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The Business of Magazines
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MissMagAddict
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Insider: Even at 70, Vogue's Anna Wintour is still 'Machiavellian'
By Merle Ginsberg | November 2, 2019 | 2:34pm
Sunday is Anna Wintour’s 70th birthday and she apparently only wants one thing: “She’s hoping for a lot more grandkids,” said a colleague of the legendary Vogue editor.
“You would have thought Anna might have cut back her hours after becoming a grandmother,” added the colleague of Wintour, who is granny to Caroline, 2, and 9-month-old Ella, the daughters of Wintour’s son Charlie Shaffer, 34, and his wife, Lizzy. “But she hasn’t. She still doing it all.”
Indeed, Wintour shows no signs of inching toward retirement. In addition to running Vogue and shepherding Condé’s entire stable as the global content adviser, she stars in myriad videos on Vogue.com and YouTube, oversees the annual Met Gala — which benefits the Anna Wintour Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — and just led a 12-part series for MasterClass, the online learning academy, called #HowToBeABoss. She’s been the fashion design consultant for the Tony Awards over the past five years and the native Londoner was named a Dame by Queen Elizabeth in 2017.
“She’s not just aging gracefully,” said one Vogue writer who requested anonymity. “She’s aging fashionably. She’s changing the whole game of who can wear what at what age.”
“Anna knows how epic this [birthday] is,” said the colleague, who has known Wintour for many years. “But she’s never played by the rules so why would she start now? Just like she’s reinvented everything else, she’s reinventing 70.”
Last week, New York Magazine published a scathing account of Condé Nast’s decline, revealing losses of $120 million in 2017. This year alone, the company has sold Golf Digest, W and Brides, after shuttering the print versions of Glamour, Self and Teen Vogue in recent years.
While rumors of Wintour’s retirement have swirled in Manhattan’s power circles for the past few years, one well-placed source believes the icon is key should the Newhouse family that owns Condé Nast ever decide to sell the company.
“They’re dependent on Anna’s glam image,” said the source.
(A Condé Nast spokesperson referred The Post to this quote: “Condé Nast has not been, is not, and will not be for sale,” Steven Newhouse told New York Magazine.)
But some feel that Wintour, who behind her signature sunglasses has long been known as the most enigmatic and unknowable woman in fashion, is spreading herself too thin. The New York Magazine story described her hosting a breakfast in her office for fifty women on the “Vogue100” — a group that appears to be a prestigious honor list, but is really a membership program with access to exclusive events and parties, costing $100,000.
“I have a jewelry-designer friend who got an invite [to be in the Vogue100],” said one former Condé editor who now works at Hearst. “She was so flattered until she realized she was being asked to pay a hundred thousand dollars for the right to get 15 minutes with Anna.”
Wintour has also taken heat for supporting the hiring of former New York Times Book Review editor Radhika Jones to be the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair after longtime editor Graydon Carter resigned. Under Jones, the magazine has been the subject of much criticism. As New York Magazine reported, “The critiques of Jones’ Vanity Fair came hard and fast: She’d sucked the glamour and mischief out of it and replaced it with bland, earnest celebrity virtue signaling. The magazine’s stories rarely seem to break through the noise.”
“I’m convinced she’s trying to kill Vanity Fair! Because as Vanity Fair declines, Vogue looks better,” said a Vanity Fair source. “She’s Machiavellian.”
“That could not be further from the truth, Anna has been a champion of Radhika from day one,” said a Condé Nast spokesperson.
A second Vanity Fair source calls Wintour’s oversight a conflict of interest.
“They need to separate her out as the editor of Vogue and the [US] artistic director of Condé Nast,” said the second Vanity Fair source. “It’s a total conflict to have both those jobs. She’s made a disaster of every other [Condé] magazine — they all look just like Vogue.”
Still, said one Wintour source, “Anna is surrounded by sycophants.”
As for her birthday, said the media colleague, “Anna’s very big on her friends’ and family’s birthdays but she’s never been big on her own. She’ll [likely] celebrate with a small group at a restaurant or at a small dinner in her townhouse on Sullivan Street.”
Among her close circle of friends are Anne McNally, the Vanity Fair writer and ex-wife of former Indochine and Odeon restaurateur Keith McNally; socialite landscape designer Miranda Brooks; and artist Hugo Guinness. The media colleague predicts Wintour will also likely celebrate with her children, their spouses and her granddaughters at her 62-acre weekend home in Mastic Beach, LI.
“Anna is very family-oriented. Her family are the only people she trusts,” said the media colleague.
Wintour’s daughter, Bee Shaffer, 32, works for the Ambassador Theatre Group, which owns, among other properties, Broadway’s Lyric and Hudson theatres. Bee married Francesco Carrozzini, son of the late Italian Vogue editor Franca Sozzani, last year. Charlie Shaffer, Wintour’s son, is a doctor. Both are the product of Wintour’s 1984-1999 marriage to child psychiatrist Dr. David Shaffer.
One person who won’t likely be at any party: Shelby Bryan, Wintour’s longtime paramour whom she met in 1999 while both were married to other people.
“When the affair went public, she was embarrassed — but it only added to her allure,” said one former Vogue employee. “They had a very combustible connection.”
But in 2013, it was revealed Bryan owed the IRS some $1.2 million in back taxes.
“That was the beginning of the end,” said the Wintour source. “He started to become a liability. It’s been quite a while since they’ve been seen together.”
There have been rumors that the editor is involved with British actor Bill Nighy — “kind of a Shelby look-alike,” said the Wintour source — with the two spotted together at plays in New York and London.
In her MasterClass, Wintour — who has had a version of the same bob haircut since she was a teenager — reveals the secret of her success: discipline. She rises at 4 a.m., plays an hour of tennis at 5:45, then gets her hair and makeup done before going to work at Condé’s One World Trade Center headquarters. Her breakfast consists of “Starbucks,” she said, while lunch is a hamburger with no bun. By 5 p.m., after a meeting-crammed day, she’s heading home to her Sullivan Street townhouse with what she calls her “magic box of tricks”: layouts, photos and sample pages from Conde’s various magazines. Her social life consists of work events or small dinners, and she’s in bed every night by 10 p.m.
While some people were shocked she would drop her icy veil to do the MasterClass, the former Vogue employee thinks it was simply time. “I think Anna figured she was the subject of so much gossip, a movie [“The Devil Wears Prada”] and two documentaries [“The September Issue” and “First Monday in May”], she might as well use it to her and Condé’s advantage. At this point, she’s almost bigger than the brand.”
That said, according to her longtime colleague, Wintour still has her eyes on a political ambassadorship.
“She needs a graceful exit strategy. Her next move has to have the appearance of even more cachet,” the colleague said. “But given that her current [presidential] candidate of choice is [long shot] Pete Buttigieg, she may not have a friend in the next White House.”
According to a Vogue spokesperson, “Anna has not chosen a candidate.”
But it could be hard to give up her visibility, said a former Condé editor.
“Anna could get six board seats — at Estée Lauder, at Apple — and make half a million a year for a few meetings. But then she’d be disconnected. Her access would be cut off. The invites would stop coming and the phone would stop ringing. She couldn’t handle that.”
On Nov. 17, Wintour is getting one of her top honors yet: She will be one of the honorees of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery American Portrait Gala, alongside the likes of Jeff Bezos and Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Her friends say that, despite being one of the most famous women in fashion, Wintour is still misunderstood.
“She gives everyone around her a seat at the table. And she’s incredibly charming when she needs to be,” said the Wintour source. “She can be a real flirt.”
A member of Wintour’s inner circle seconded that.
“People don’t understand Anna, which is fine, she doesn’t need them to. But she is actually shy, kind, loyal, a great friend, fiercely intelligent and cultured beyond belief,” said the inner-circle source. “I keep telling her the best thing she could do now is write a book. Many books. Then she’d have ‘bestselling author’ to add to her list of accomplishments.”
source | pagesix
By Merle Ginsberg | November 2, 2019 | 2:34pm
Sunday is Anna Wintour’s 70th birthday and she apparently only wants one thing: “She’s hoping for a lot more grandkids,” said a colleague of the legendary Vogue editor.
“You would have thought Anna might have cut back her hours after becoming a grandmother,” added the colleague of Wintour, who is granny to Caroline, 2, and 9-month-old Ella, the daughters of Wintour’s son Charlie Shaffer, 34, and his wife, Lizzy. “But she hasn’t. She still doing it all.”
Indeed, Wintour shows no signs of inching toward retirement. In addition to running Vogue and shepherding Condé’s entire stable as the global content adviser, she stars in myriad videos on Vogue.com and YouTube, oversees the annual Met Gala — which benefits the Anna Wintour Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — and just led a 12-part series for MasterClass, the online learning academy, called #HowToBeABoss. She’s been the fashion design consultant for the Tony Awards over the past five years and the native Londoner was named a Dame by Queen Elizabeth in 2017.
“She’s not just aging gracefully,” said one Vogue writer who requested anonymity. “She’s aging fashionably. She’s changing the whole game of who can wear what at what age.”
“Anna knows how epic this [birthday] is,” said the colleague, who has known Wintour for many years. “But she’s never played by the rules so why would she start now? Just like she’s reinvented everything else, she’s reinventing 70.”
Last week, New York Magazine published a scathing account of Condé Nast’s decline, revealing losses of $120 million in 2017. This year alone, the company has sold Golf Digest, W and Brides, after shuttering the print versions of Glamour, Self and Teen Vogue in recent years.
While rumors of Wintour’s retirement have swirled in Manhattan’s power circles for the past few years, one well-placed source believes the icon is key should the Newhouse family that owns Condé Nast ever decide to sell the company.
“They’re dependent on Anna’s glam image,” said the source.
(A Condé Nast spokesperson referred The Post to this quote: “Condé Nast has not been, is not, and will not be for sale,” Steven Newhouse told New York Magazine.)
But some feel that Wintour, who behind her signature sunglasses has long been known as the most enigmatic and unknowable woman in fashion, is spreading herself too thin. The New York Magazine story described her hosting a breakfast in her office for fifty women on the “Vogue100” — a group that appears to be a prestigious honor list, but is really a membership program with access to exclusive events and parties, costing $100,000.
“I have a jewelry-designer friend who got an invite [to be in the Vogue100],” said one former Condé editor who now works at Hearst. “She was so flattered until she realized she was being asked to pay a hundred thousand dollars for the right to get 15 minutes with Anna.”
Wintour has also taken heat for supporting the hiring of former New York Times Book Review editor Radhika Jones to be the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair after longtime editor Graydon Carter resigned. Under Jones, the magazine has been the subject of much criticism. As New York Magazine reported, “The critiques of Jones’ Vanity Fair came hard and fast: She’d sucked the glamour and mischief out of it and replaced it with bland, earnest celebrity virtue signaling. The magazine’s stories rarely seem to break through the noise.”
“I’m convinced she’s trying to kill Vanity Fair! Because as Vanity Fair declines, Vogue looks better,” said a Vanity Fair source. “She’s Machiavellian.”
“That could not be further from the truth, Anna has been a champion of Radhika from day one,” said a Condé Nast spokesperson.
A second Vanity Fair source calls Wintour’s oversight a conflict of interest.
“They need to separate her out as the editor of Vogue and the [US] artistic director of Condé Nast,” said the second Vanity Fair source. “It’s a total conflict to have both those jobs. She’s made a disaster of every other [Condé] magazine — they all look just like Vogue.”
Still, said one Wintour source, “Anna is surrounded by sycophants.”
As for her birthday, said the media colleague, “Anna’s very big on her friends’ and family’s birthdays but she’s never been big on her own. She’ll [likely] celebrate with a small group at a restaurant or at a small dinner in her townhouse on Sullivan Street.”
Among her close circle of friends are Anne McNally, the Vanity Fair writer and ex-wife of former Indochine and Odeon restaurateur Keith McNally; socialite landscape designer Miranda Brooks; and artist Hugo Guinness. The media colleague predicts Wintour will also likely celebrate with her children, their spouses and her granddaughters at her 62-acre weekend home in Mastic Beach, LI.
“Anna is very family-oriented. Her family are the only people she trusts,” said the media colleague.
Wintour’s daughter, Bee Shaffer, 32, works for the Ambassador Theatre Group, which owns, among other properties, Broadway’s Lyric and Hudson theatres. Bee married Francesco Carrozzini, son of the late Italian Vogue editor Franca Sozzani, last year. Charlie Shaffer, Wintour’s son, is a doctor. Both are the product of Wintour’s 1984-1999 marriage to child psychiatrist Dr. David Shaffer.
One person who won’t likely be at any party: Shelby Bryan, Wintour’s longtime paramour whom she met in 1999 while both were married to other people.
“When the affair went public, she was embarrassed — but it only added to her allure,” said one former Vogue employee. “They had a very combustible connection.”
But in 2013, it was revealed Bryan owed the IRS some $1.2 million in back taxes.
“That was the beginning of the end,” said the Wintour source. “He started to become a liability. It’s been quite a while since they’ve been seen together.”
There have been rumors that the editor is involved with British actor Bill Nighy — “kind of a Shelby look-alike,” said the Wintour source — with the two spotted together at plays in New York and London.
In her MasterClass, Wintour — who has had a version of the same bob haircut since she was a teenager — reveals the secret of her success: discipline. She rises at 4 a.m., plays an hour of tennis at 5:45, then gets her hair and makeup done before going to work at Condé’s One World Trade Center headquarters. Her breakfast consists of “Starbucks,” she said, while lunch is a hamburger with no bun. By 5 p.m., after a meeting-crammed day, she’s heading home to her Sullivan Street townhouse with what she calls her “magic box of tricks”: layouts, photos and sample pages from Conde’s various magazines. Her social life consists of work events or small dinners, and she’s in bed every night by 10 p.m.
While some people were shocked she would drop her icy veil to do the MasterClass, the former Vogue employee thinks it was simply time. “I think Anna figured she was the subject of so much gossip, a movie [“The Devil Wears Prada”] and two documentaries [“The September Issue” and “First Monday in May”], she might as well use it to her and Condé’s advantage. At this point, she’s almost bigger than the brand.”
That said, according to her longtime colleague, Wintour still has her eyes on a political ambassadorship.
“She needs a graceful exit strategy. Her next move has to have the appearance of even more cachet,” the colleague said. “But given that her current [presidential] candidate of choice is [long shot] Pete Buttigieg, she may not have a friend in the next White House.”
According to a Vogue spokesperson, “Anna has not chosen a candidate.”
But it could be hard to give up her visibility, said a former Condé editor.
“Anna could get six board seats — at Estée Lauder, at Apple — and make half a million a year for a few meetings. But then she’d be disconnected. Her access would be cut off. The invites would stop coming and the phone would stop ringing. She couldn’t handle that.”
On Nov. 17, Wintour is getting one of her top honors yet: She will be one of the honorees of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery American Portrait Gala, alongside the likes of Jeff Bezos and Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Her friends say that, despite being one of the most famous women in fashion, Wintour is still misunderstood.
“She gives everyone around her a seat at the table. And she’s incredibly charming when she needs to be,” said the Wintour source. “She can be a real flirt.”
A member of Wintour’s inner circle seconded that.
“People don’t understand Anna, which is fine, she doesn’t need them to. But she is actually shy, kind, loyal, a great friend, fiercely intelligent and cultured beyond belief,” said the inner-circle source. “I keep telling her the best thing she could do now is write a book. Many books. Then she’d have ‘bestselling author’ to add to her list of accomplishments.”
source | pagesix
tigerrouge
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Anna Wintour cultivating a certain reputation and becoming more iconic than the Vogue brand itself has been a great decision for her, and it gave everyone some harmless entertainment when times were good.
But over the long term, it's not been great for the magazine - the executives at Conde Nast have placed so many bets on the idea that she was the one to drive things forward with a strong vision - because in times of uncertainty, people will respond to those who present themselves as an authority figure.
But it doesn't take much to realise that someone so successful at running a magazine that's connected to the fashion and celebrity world knows all about how to sway people's perceptions for the better, regardless of what's really going on underneath. And a lot of things can get covered up or ignored for a long time with these methods - including anyone's lack of financial or business success behind the scenes.
And I also get the feeling we've lost out on a lot of editors who could be doing good at magazines right now - no matter how much you nurture talent, if your schtick is to be THE authority figure, you can't ever allow others to rise up and present a strong alternative to yourself, because you would be diluting your own authority, your image, your bargaining tool.
You'd cultivate disciples who'd follow in your footsteps, but you'd never allow genuine challengers who'd seek to fill your shoes on a different level to yourself.
But over the long term, it's not been great for the magazine - the executives at Conde Nast have placed so many bets on the idea that she was the one to drive things forward with a strong vision - because in times of uncertainty, people will respond to those who present themselves as an authority figure.
But it doesn't take much to realise that someone so successful at running a magazine that's connected to the fashion and celebrity world knows all about how to sway people's perceptions for the better, regardless of what's really going on underneath. And a lot of things can get covered up or ignored for a long time with these methods - including anyone's lack of financial or business success behind the scenes.
And I also get the feeling we've lost out on a lot of editors who could be doing good at magazines right now - no matter how much you nurture talent, if your schtick is to be THE authority figure, you can't ever allow others to rise up and present a strong alternative to yourself, because you would be diluting your own authority, your image, your bargaining tool.
You'd cultivate disciples who'd follow in your footsteps, but you'd never allow genuine challengers who'd seek to fill your shoes on a different level to yourself.
Xone
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I agree and that applies to all industries...in this specific case i would love to know more concrete cases beside the obvious "Nuclear Wintour" Gossip. I think a lot what people say is more like gossip so i guess it's a little bit confusing.... I don't Think Grace or Tonee will ever wanted to fill AW shoes...Virginia or Sally maybe...
MissMagAddict
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As Men Are Canceled, So Too Their Magazine Subscriptions
By Alex Williams Nov. 2, 2019
Imagine if Kodak had answered the threat of digital photography by pivoting from film to outdoor grills.
Imagine if Blockbuster had taken on the challenge from Netflix by shifting from DVDs to fast food.
Imagine if men’s magazines stared down the post-#MeToo manpocalypse by disowning men.
Maybe the last one isn’t so hypothetical?
At a time when calls are growing for the Oscars, Tonys and Emmys to follow the Grammys and the MTV Video Music Awards in erasing gendered categories, and to do away with gender-specific magazines, bro bibles like GQ, Esquire and Playboy seem poised to do a backpedal of Michael Jackson moonwalk proportions from the formula that kept them perched at the publishing pinnacle for a half-century.
Namely, being a print version of your father, offering up bourbon-breathed tutorials on the arts of tie knotting, fly casting, and skirt chasing.
In the gender tornado of 2019, men’s magazines, it seems, are canceling themselves. (The internet’s assault on glossy print isn’t helping either.)
“How do you make a so-called men’s magazine in the thick of what has justifiably become the Shut Up and Listen moment?” wrote Will Welch, the editor of GQ, in a cri de coeur introduction to this month’s “New Masculinity” issue. “One way we’ve addressed it,” he continued, “is by making a magazine that isn’t really trying to be exclusively for or about men at all.
So gender fluid it’s soggy, the 128-page issue might well have been themed “No Masculinity,” with its androgynous cover image of Pharrell Williams looking like an inverted tulip in a floor-length yellow Moncler Pierpaolo Piccioli coat, followed by ruminations on the “weaponized” male body by Thomas Page McBee, a transgender writer and boxer; a defense of makeup for men by EJ Johnson, Magic Johnson’s son whose fashion tastes run toward fur shawls and diamond chokers; and a debunking of the power of testosterone itself by Katrina Karkazis, a cultural anthropologist and author.
Such untraditional content is a survival strategy for glossies with a Y chromosome tilt in this homo novus era, where every reference to masculinity wears an implied “toxic” like a hair shirt.
Even Playboy, mired in identity crisis since dial-up modems, is suddenly woke.
The magazine has rechristened its Bunnies as “brand ambassadors,” and even embarked on a short-lived experiment to cut out the nudes. After the death of its founder Hugh Hefner in 2017, Playboy has morphed into an art-book quarterly that ditched its old tee-hee-hee motto, “Entertainment for Men,” for a gender-blinkered “Entertainment for All.”
It’s an open question whether the men who now turn to Pornhub and its ilk for the kind of “entertainment” that Playboy built an empire on even noticed.
Even so, the magazine, which long held up Hef, with his phallic-symbol pipe and star-studded skin romps at the Playboy Mansion, as the epitome of American straight male aspiration, is turning the brand’s hyper-male, hyper-hetero legacy on its head.
The magazine’s new leadership team consists of a gay man (the executive editor Shane Singh) and two women (the creative director Erica Loewy and Anna Wilson, who is in charge of photography and multimedia), all millennials.
Recent feature articles include profiles of Andrea Drummer, a female African-American chef who runs a cannabis-centric restaurant in Los Angeles, and King Princess, a genderqueer pop singer who is as a symbol of self-acceptance to young L.G.B.T.Q. fans.
For a cover image this summer, the team commissioned the fine-art photographer Ed Freeman (a rare man who still shoots for Playboy, though he is gay) for an arty underwater shot featuring three featuring female activists for causes like ocean conservation and H.I.V. awareness.
“The water,” Mr. Singh explained to Jessica Bennett of The New York Times for an article in August, “is meant to represent gender and sexual fluidity.”
Change is also afoot at Esquire, the tweediest of the men’s titles, which for decades carried a whiff of dad’s old cedar chest full of pocketknives and Mickey Mantle baseball cards.
This past June, the magazine installed its second editor, Michael Sebastian, in three years. Mr. Sebastian, 39, made his name as Esquire’s digital director, where he oversaw a significant rise in traffic to the site, according to Hearst.
His appointment as editor prompted industry speculation that he was going to go “full Cosmo,” chasing Instagram-friendly content and trending topics on Twitter just like Cosmopolitan, Esquire’s sister publication at Hearst that has lately been pursuing data as hotly as it long proselytized multiple orgasms.
The move seemed symbolic. Mr. Sebastian replaced Jay Fielden, a dapper Texan given to Hemingway and Cifonelli suits, who had departed weeks before, citing the lure of new (and unspecified) possibilities. Mr. Fielden had vowed to revive the “literary charisma” of the magazine of Fitzgerald and Dos Passos. He may have fit the image of the “Esquire man” too well for the times.
In one of his first interviews after he got the job, Mr. Sebastian took a swipe at the publishing patriarchy, telling The Wall Street Journal that he wanted to get away from the idea “that both the Esquire reader and writer is a middle-age white guy who likes brown liquor and brown leather.”
In fairness to Mr. Fielden, he said pretty much the same thing years ago, before Harvey Weinstein and his ilk sent half the population to the penalty box. “There’s no cigar smoke wafting through the pages,” he said to The New York Times in 2017, “and the obligatory three B’s are gone, too — brown liquor, boxing and bullfighting.”
As the same article reported, Mr. Fielden had won the job in part because he courted more male readers to the traditionally feminine Town & Country, the Hearst title he headed before Esquire.
At Esquire, he vowed to lure more female readers and ditched boys’ club staples like the print version of the “Women We Love” issue.
Apparently, it was not enough. Could anything be? Perhaps not, as manhood itself is being interrogated, scrutinized and radically revised.
The very idea of a men’s magazine now sounds “as hopelessly passé as a private gentlemen’s club,” according to a recent article, “The End of Men’s Magazines,” in City Journal, which is not exactly a progressive organ (the magazine is published by the Manhattan Institute, a free-market think tank).
Maybe. Or maybe not.
Details is done. Maxim has evolved its identity from a frat-house must-read to a cosmopolitan lifestyle magazine, an about-face that began under a female editor and fashion veteran, Kate Lanphear, who departed in 2015.
But Esquire has already survived the Great Depression, World War II, disco, yuppies and the dot-com bust. It’s still here.
And plenty of readers are still here, too, even in a brutal publishing climate that has forced august women’s titles like Glamour, Seventeen, Self, and Redbook to retreat from print for the web.
Despite a plunge in newsstand sales that has plagued the whole industry, Esquire still had an estimated total average circulation of 709,000 for the first six months of this year, according to the Alliance for Audited Media; the figure accounts for both print and digital subscriptions as well as single-copy sales.
GQ, too, is a long, long way from life support, with a figure of 934,000 for the same period, according to the alliance.
Times change, sometimes violently. But recent history is full of apparent anachronisms (gas guzzlers, Birkenstocks, Donald Trump) that managed an unlikely second act. And men’s magazines have proven pretty adept at sniffing out the shifts in culture, both trivial and seismic, over the decades — which is one reason they have been around for decades.
Esquire may have swaggered into the 1960s as the Don Draper of magazines, but as the old order began to crumble thanks to Betty Friedan, the Black Panthers and many others, the magazine’s editor, Harold Hayes, quickly detoured into a flower-power-era version of woke.
He commissioned Susan Sontag’s dispatch from Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War, and James Baldwin’s ruminations on race in America after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Even Playboy opened its pages to thought-provoking interviews with Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X and Fidel Castro while sprinkling in at least a few pictorials featuring Playmates of color.
Yes, that was a different time. We’ve come a long way from Gloria Steinem decrying “The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed” thanks to the Pill in Esquire in 1962, to Hannah Gadsby, a lesbian comedian, taking aim at “hypermasculine man-babies” in GQ’s “New Masculinity” issue.
Haven’t we?
source | nytimes
By Alex Williams Nov. 2, 2019
Imagine if Kodak had answered the threat of digital photography by pivoting from film to outdoor grills.
Imagine if Blockbuster had taken on the challenge from Netflix by shifting from DVDs to fast food.
Imagine if men’s magazines stared down the post-#MeToo manpocalypse by disowning men.
Maybe the last one isn’t so hypothetical?
At a time when calls are growing for the Oscars, Tonys and Emmys to follow the Grammys and the MTV Video Music Awards in erasing gendered categories, and to do away with gender-specific magazines, bro bibles like GQ, Esquire and Playboy seem poised to do a backpedal of Michael Jackson moonwalk proportions from the formula that kept them perched at the publishing pinnacle for a half-century.
Namely, being a print version of your father, offering up bourbon-breathed tutorials on the arts of tie knotting, fly casting, and skirt chasing.
In the gender tornado of 2019, men’s magazines, it seems, are canceling themselves. (The internet’s assault on glossy print isn’t helping either.)
“How do you make a so-called men’s magazine in the thick of what has justifiably become the Shut Up and Listen moment?” wrote Will Welch, the editor of GQ, in a cri de coeur introduction to this month’s “New Masculinity” issue. “One way we’ve addressed it,” he continued, “is by making a magazine that isn’t really trying to be exclusively for or about men at all.
So gender fluid it’s soggy, the 128-page issue might well have been themed “No Masculinity,” with its androgynous cover image of Pharrell Williams looking like an inverted tulip in a floor-length yellow Moncler Pierpaolo Piccioli coat, followed by ruminations on the “weaponized” male body by Thomas Page McBee, a transgender writer and boxer; a defense of makeup for men by EJ Johnson, Magic Johnson’s son whose fashion tastes run toward fur shawls and diamond chokers; and a debunking of the power of testosterone itself by Katrina Karkazis, a cultural anthropologist and author.
Such untraditional content is a survival strategy for glossies with a Y chromosome tilt in this homo novus era, where every reference to masculinity wears an implied “toxic” like a hair shirt.
Even Playboy, mired in identity crisis since dial-up modems, is suddenly woke.
The magazine has rechristened its Bunnies as “brand ambassadors,” and even embarked on a short-lived experiment to cut out the nudes. After the death of its founder Hugh Hefner in 2017, Playboy has morphed into an art-book quarterly that ditched its old tee-hee-hee motto, “Entertainment for Men,” for a gender-blinkered “Entertainment for All.”
It’s an open question whether the men who now turn to Pornhub and its ilk for the kind of “entertainment” that Playboy built an empire on even noticed.
Even so, the magazine, which long held up Hef, with his phallic-symbol pipe and star-studded skin romps at the Playboy Mansion, as the epitome of American straight male aspiration, is turning the brand’s hyper-male, hyper-hetero legacy on its head.
The magazine’s new leadership team consists of a gay man (the executive editor Shane Singh) and two women (the creative director Erica Loewy and Anna Wilson, who is in charge of photography and multimedia), all millennials.
Recent feature articles include profiles of Andrea Drummer, a female African-American chef who runs a cannabis-centric restaurant in Los Angeles, and King Princess, a genderqueer pop singer who is as a symbol of self-acceptance to young L.G.B.T.Q. fans.
For a cover image this summer, the team commissioned the fine-art photographer Ed Freeman (a rare man who still shoots for Playboy, though he is gay) for an arty underwater shot featuring three featuring female activists for causes like ocean conservation and H.I.V. awareness.
“The water,” Mr. Singh explained to Jessica Bennett of The New York Times for an article in August, “is meant to represent gender and sexual fluidity.”
Change is also afoot at Esquire, the tweediest of the men’s titles, which for decades carried a whiff of dad’s old cedar chest full of pocketknives and Mickey Mantle baseball cards.
This past June, the magazine installed its second editor, Michael Sebastian, in three years. Mr. Sebastian, 39, made his name as Esquire’s digital director, where he oversaw a significant rise in traffic to the site, according to Hearst.
His appointment as editor prompted industry speculation that he was going to go “full Cosmo,” chasing Instagram-friendly content and trending topics on Twitter just like Cosmopolitan, Esquire’s sister publication at Hearst that has lately been pursuing data as hotly as it long proselytized multiple orgasms.
The move seemed symbolic. Mr. Sebastian replaced Jay Fielden, a dapper Texan given to Hemingway and Cifonelli suits, who had departed weeks before, citing the lure of new (and unspecified) possibilities. Mr. Fielden had vowed to revive the “literary charisma” of the magazine of Fitzgerald and Dos Passos. He may have fit the image of the “Esquire man” too well for the times.
In one of his first interviews after he got the job, Mr. Sebastian took a swipe at the publishing patriarchy, telling The Wall Street Journal that he wanted to get away from the idea “that both the Esquire reader and writer is a middle-age white guy who likes brown liquor and brown leather.”
In fairness to Mr. Fielden, he said pretty much the same thing years ago, before Harvey Weinstein and his ilk sent half the population to the penalty box. “There’s no cigar smoke wafting through the pages,” he said to The New York Times in 2017, “and the obligatory three B’s are gone, too — brown liquor, boxing and bullfighting.”
As the same article reported, Mr. Fielden had won the job in part because he courted more male readers to the traditionally feminine Town & Country, the Hearst title he headed before Esquire.
At Esquire, he vowed to lure more female readers and ditched boys’ club staples like the print version of the “Women We Love” issue.
Apparently, it was not enough. Could anything be? Perhaps not, as manhood itself is being interrogated, scrutinized and radically revised.
The very idea of a men’s magazine now sounds “as hopelessly passé as a private gentlemen’s club,” according to a recent article, “The End of Men’s Magazines,” in City Journal, which is not exactly a progressive organ (the magazine is published by the Manhattan Institute, a free-market think tank).
Maybe. Or maybe not.
Details is done. Maxim has evolved its identity from a frat-house must-read to a cosmopolitan lifestyle magazine, an about-face that began under a female editor and fashion veteran, Kate Lanphear, who departed in 2015.
But Esquire has already survived the Great Depression, World War II, disco, yuppies and the dot-com bust. It’s still here.
And plenty of readers are still here, too, even in a brutal publishing climate that has forced august women’s titles like Glamour, Seventeen, Self, and Redbook to retreat from print for the web.
Despite a plunge in newsstand sales that has plagued the whole industry, Esquire still had an estimated total average circulation of 709,000 for the first six months of this year, according to the Alliance for Audited Media; the figure accounts for both print and digital subscriptions as well as single-copy sales.
GQ, too, is a long, long way from life support, with a figure of 934,000 for the same period, according to the alliance.
Times change, sometimes violently. But recent history is full of apparent anachronisms (gas guzzlers, Birkenstocks, Donald Trump) that managed an unlikely second act. And men’s magazines have proven pretty adept at sniffing out the shifts in culture, both trivial and seismic, over the decades — which is one reason they have been around for decades.
Esquire may have swaggered into the 1960s as the Don Draper of magazines, but as the old order began to crumble thanks to Betty Friedan, the Black Panthers and many others, the magazine’s editor, Harold Hayes, quickly detoured into a flower-power-era version of woke.
He commissioned Susan Sontag’s dispatch from Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War, and James Baldwin’s ruminations on race in America after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Even Playboy opened its pages to thought-provoking interviews with Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X and Fidel Castro while sprinkling in at least a few pictorials featuring Playmates of color.
Yes, that was a different time. We’ve come a long way from Gloria Steinem decrying “The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed” thanks to the Pill in Esquire in 1962, to Hannah Gadsby, a lesbian comedian, taking aim at “hypermasculine man-babies” in GQ’s “New Masculinity” issue.
Haven’t we?
source | nytimes
amby
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Met Gala 2020 theme has been announced:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Announces Its 2020 Theme: “About Time: Fashion and Duration”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Announces Its 2020 Theme: “About Time: Fashion and Duration”
Benn98
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Alexandra Shulman via The Guardian:
The criticism when I became editor-in-chief of Vogue amused me. People said I was a words rather than a pictures person and that I had never worked in fashion before. My job was just to prove I could do it – which I did for 25 years. Michelle Obama was the one cover star I’d loved to have got. I tried… and failed.
I lose my temper when I get frustrated, but usually only with the people I love. I did lose my temper twice at Vogue – both times with men. Are Anna Wintour and I on each other’s Christmas card list? I don’t think either of us sends Christmas cards. So no.
The criticism when I became editor-in-chief of Vogue amused me. People said I was a words rather than a pictures person and that I had never worked in fashion before. My job was just to prove I could do it – which I did for 25 years. Michelle Obama was the one cover star I’d loved to have got. I tried… and failed.
I lose my temper when I get frustrated, but usually only with the people I love. I did lose my temper twice at Vogue – both times with men. Are Anna Wintour and I on each other’s Christmas card list? I don’t think either of us sends Christmas cards. So no.
Srdjan
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It appears that Polish Bazaar, Cosmo, Esquire, Playboy, as well as other titles from the Marquard Media are closing.
Article in Polish: "Playboy", "CKM", "Cosmopolitan" znikają z rynku. Marquard Media zamyka magazyny w Polsce | Z kraju
Article in Polish: "Playboy", "CKM", "Cosmopolitan" znikają z rynku. Marquard Media zamyka magazyny w Polsce | Z kraju
Hafyiez wafa
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tigerrouge
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In the UK, Conde Nast already do that - subscriptions now come in a 'starchy' biodegradable bag that you can re-use to collect your food waste in, before it goes into your compostable bin.
It's a recent development, but a good one.
It's a recent development, but a good one.
Benn98
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With Glamour Italy Saying Arrivederci, What About the Other Editions?
Here's a rundown of all of Glamour's other issues, including the U.S., Brazil and Iceland.
By Kathryn Hopkins on December 2, 2019
For decades, Glamour was a huge money-maker for Condé Nast, with the success of the 80-plus-year-old U.S. edition leading to around 16 international versions.
In recent times, however, Glamour has been pivoting worldwide as it adjusts to the new media landscape and seeks to make up for the plunge in its advertising revenue.
The latest casualty was Glamour Italy, which Condé Nast Italy revealed last week would shutter both its print edition and digital offering after 27 years in business.
Explaining the reasoning behind the decision, Condé Nast Italy chief executive officer Fedele Usai said his focus is to create products “to accompany our public in the future.”
But what has happened to all the other versions of the vast Glamour empire? Here, WWD provides a handy scorecard on which are still in print, which have become digital-only publications — and which have gone to that great magazine graveyard in the sky.
U.S.
Glamour ceased its regular glossy print edition at the beginning of the year in favor of “special” editions, with its focus now being digital. It also holds the annual Glamour Women of the Year Summit and an accompanying celebrity-filled awards show, as well as having a few podcasts under its belt.
Digital: 6.3 million unique users
U.K.
In 2017, Glamour U.K. — once a jewel in the crown of Condé — reduced its print frequency from monthly to twice a year as part of an overhaul and is now a digital-first publication. It also runs the Glamour Beauty Festival.
Print readership: 350,000
Digital: 2.1 million unique users
Turkey
A print and digital Turkish version of Glamour was launched in 2016 through a license agreement with Dogus Media Group. It has since been shuttered and Condé now only has Vogue and GQ in Turkey.
South Africa
Launched in 2004, Glamour South Africa has a monthly print edition, a digital site and the Woman of the Year awards.
Print readership: 420,000
Digital: 64,100 unique users
France
Condé now publishes a bi-monthly print edition of French Glamour, as well as its digital site, called Glamour Paris.
Print readership: 735,200
Digital: 1.5 million unique users
Iceland
When it began in 2015, it was the first international magazine franchise to debut in the Icelandic market. It is now mainly online with a biannual print edition, published through licensee 365 Media Group.
Digital: 10,300 unique users
Netherlands
It has a monthly print edition and online, as well as National Glamour Day and the Glamour Beauty Festival.
Print readership: 852,500
Digital: 1.1 million unique users
Russia
Condé still publishes a monthly Glamour Russia print edition, as well as the Glamour Style Book print three times a year. Like, the U.S., it also has a Woman of the Year Awards, as well as Glamour Shopping Week, Glamour Best of Beauty and Glamour Influencers Awards.
Print readership: 1.2 million
Digital: Three million unique users
Germany
In addition to a monthly print edition and online, Glamour Germany runs Glamour Shopping Week, the Glamour Beauty Festival and the so-called Glammy Awards.
Print readership: 1.6 million
Digital: 1.8 million unique visitors
Brazil
Launched in 2012, Glamour Brazil has 10 print editions a year and a digital site. It also has its own version of the Glamour Women of the Year Awards.
Print readership: 400,000
Digital: 8.6 million unique users
Poland
Glamour Poland began in 2003, in partnership with licensee Burda GL Polska Sp. Z o.o. It still has a monthly print edition, as well as a myriad of events, including the Glammies, Glamour Girl of the Year and the Glamour Summer Camp.
Print readership: 373,500
Digital: 1.4 million unique users
Bulgaria
Published under license to S Media Team since 2009, Glamour Bulgaria has a bi-monthly print edition and a digital site.
Print readership: 600,000
Digital: 6,700 unique users
Mexico/Latin America
Condé Nast entered Mexico and Latin America with Glamour Magazine, but ceased its print edition last year and is now solely a digital publication. It also has Vogue, GQ and Architectural Digest in Mexico.
Digital: 2.2 million unique users
Spain
Another European country that still has a monthly edition.
Print readership: 344,000
Digital: 6.3 million unique visitors
Hungary
The monthly magazine and website are part of Condé Nast International and published through a deal with regional media company Ringier Axel Springer.
Print readership: 77,700
Digital: 1.3 million unique users
Romania
Established in 2006, the Romanian edition is published under a license agreement with Black Ink Publishing. In addition to a quarterly print magazine and online, it has a National Glamour Day and the Glamour Beauty Festival.
Print readership: 59,000
Digital: 79,300 unique visitors
WWD
Here's a rundown of all of Glamour's other issues, including the U.S., Brazil and Iceland.
By Kathryn Hopkins on December 2, 2019
For decades, Glamour was a huge money-maker for Condé Nast, with the success of the 80-plus-year-old U.S. edition leading to around 16 international versions.
In recent times, however, Glamour has been pivoting worldwide as it adjusts to the new media landscape and seeks to make up for the plunge in its advertising revenue.
The latest casualty was Glamour Italy, which Condé Nast Italy revealed last week would shutter both its print edition and digital offering after 27 years in business.
Explaining the reasoning behind the decision, Condé Nast Italy chief executive officer Fedele Usai said his focus is to create products “to accompany our public in the future.”
But what has happened to all the other versions of the vast Glamour empire? Here, WWD provides a handy scorecard on which are still in print, which have become digital-only publications — and which have gone to that great magazine graveyard in the sky.
U.S.
Glamour ceased its regular glossy print edition at the beginning of the year in favor of “special” editions, with its focus now being digital. It also holds the annual Glamour Women of the Year Summit and an accompanying celebrity-filled awards show, as well as having a few podcasts under its belt.
Digital: 6.3 million unique users
U.K.
In 2017, Glamour U.K. — once a jewel in the crown of Condé — reduced its print frequency from monthly to twice a year as part of an overhaul and is now a digital-first publication. It also runs the Glamour Beauty Festival.
Print readership: 350,000
Digital: 2.1 million unique users
Turkey
A print and digital Turkish version of Glamour was launched in 2016 through a license agreement with Dogus Media Group. It has since been shuttered and Condé now only has Vogue and GQ in Turkey.
South Africa
Launched in 2004, Glamour South Africa has a monthly print edition, a digital site and the Woman of the Year awards.
Print readership: 420,000
Digital: 64,100 unique users
France
Condé now publishes a bi-monthly print edition of French Glamour, as well as its digital site, called Glamour Paris.
Print readership: 735,200
Digital: 1.5 million unique users
Iceland
When it began in 2015, it was the first international magazine franchise to debut in the Icelandic market. It is now mainly online with a biannual print edition, published through licensee 365 Media Group.
Digital: 10,300 unique users
Netherlands
It has a monthly print edition and online, as well as National Glamour Day and the Glamour Beauty Festival.
Print readership: 852,500
Digital: 1.1 million unique users
Russia
Condé still publishes a monthly Glamour Russia print edition, as well as the Glamour Style Book print three times a year. Like, the U.S., it also has a Woman of the Year Awards, as well as Glamour Shopping Week, Glamour Best of Beauty and Glamour Influencers Awards.
Print readership: 1.2 million
Digital: Three million unique users
Germany
In addition to a monthly print edition and online, Glamour Germany runs Glamour Shopping Week, the Glamour Beauty Festival and the so-called Glammy Awards.
Print readership: 1.6 million
Digital: 1.8 million unique visitors
Brazil
Launched in 2012, Glamour Brazil has 10 print editions a year and a digital site. It also has its own version of the Glamour Women of the Year Awards.
Print readership: 400,000
Digital: 8.6 million unique users
Poland
Glamour Poland began in 2003, in partnership with licensee Burda GL Polska Sp. Z o.o. It still has a monthly print edition, as well as a myriad of events, including the Glammies, Glamour Girl of the Year and the Glamour Summer Camp.
Print readership: 373,500
Digital: 1.4 million unique users
Bulgaria
Published under license to S Media Team since 2009, Glamour Bulgaria has a bi-monthly print edition and a digital site.
Print readership: 600,000
Digital: 6,700 unique users
Mexico/Latin America
Condé Nast entered Mexico and Latin America with Glamour Magazine, but ceased its print edition last year and is now solely a digital publication. It also has Vogue, GQ and Architectural Digest in Mexico.
Digital: 2.2 million unique users
Spain
Another European country that still has a monthly edition.
Print readership: 344,000
Digital: 6.3 million unique visitors
Hungary
The monthly magazine and website are part of Condé Nast International and published through a deal with regional media company Ringier Axel Springer.
Print readership: 77,700
Digital: 1.3 million unique users
Romania
Established in 2006, the Romanian edition is published under a license agreement with Black Ink Publishing. In addition to a quarterly print magazine and online, it has a National Glamour Day and the Glamour Beauty Festival.
Print readership: 59,000
Digital: 79,300 unique visitors
WWD
Srdjan
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Jeez! Had no idea Italian Glamour is closing! It was quite popular here in Serbia during the 00s.
In addition to this magazine and the Polish ones which we heard about recently, I have also read that Lithuanian and Finnish Cosmopolitan editions are closing after 20 years of being present in the market. No matter how irrelevant these magazines are to the global market, it truly is devastating news. I guess there's more to come.
In addition to this magazine and the Polish ones which we heard about recently, I have also read that Lithuanian and Finnish Cosmopolitan editions are closing after 20 years of being present in the market. No matter how irrelevant these magazines are to the global market, it truly is devastating news. I guess there's more to come.
Benn98
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Just because Glamour is closing in Italy doesn't necessarily mean Farneti will get more buyers. To the contrary, it means he should actually be more alert to the risk of losing readers with his careless direction.
You really have to understand how criminally mismanaged Glamour Italia must have been if they had to shut down while Elle and Vanity Fair still publish weekly with original content and no less than 180 pages. That right there tells you that the problem cannot be with 'people moving away from print', but with the product and how it's being managed.
I do agree that at the core, Glamour is a tool which lost it's usefulness. I'm not a fan of British Glamour, but when you think of it they were really clever to revamp into a beauty-centric magazine because it's not really something we have on UK newsstands, and the beauty business is tremendously popular right now.
You really have to understand how criminally mismanaged Glamour Italia must have been if they had to shut down while Elle and Vanity Fair still publish weekly with original content and no less than 180 pages. That right there tells you that the problem cannot be with 'people moving away from print', but with the product and how it's being managed.
I do agree that at the core, Glamour is a tool which lost it's usefulness. I'm not a fan of British Glamour, but when you think of it they were really clever to revamp into a beauty-centric magazine because it's not really something we have on UK newsstands, and the beauty business is tremendously popular right now.
MissMagAddict
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Posting this for people that might be interested in
further reading beyond just fashion.
further reading beyond just fashion.
MissMagAddict
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Inside The World of Interiors, Condé Nast’s Secret Weapon
By Steven Kurutz
Dec. 4, 2019, 4:10 p.m. ET
LONDON — To be a magazine reader these days is to lament — unless you are reading The World of Interiors, published since 1982 by Condé Nast Britain but widely available on American newsstands, where it sells for $9.99 per issue.
The World of Interiors is essentially a decorating magazine, but this is like saying Vogue concerns itself with sewing. It showcases seemingly every facet of the decorative arts and crafts over centuries, from the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s Manhattan studio to an antique dealer’s 16th-century Shropshire pile to a shepherd’s hut, while reviewing books like “The People’s Galleries: Art Museums and Exhibitions in Britain 1800-1914.” It’s intelligent, witty and wide-ranging in its curiosity: a bible.
And a rarity.
Two decades after the internet changed everything, magazines mostly have yet to figure out how to thrive in a digital world. Details and Domino folded. Glamour, Seventeen, Vibe, Self and Playboy have either retreated from print altogether or appear on newsstands infrequently. Titles once so culturally influential they created mythologies around them — Time, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone — have been supplanted by social media and blogs, and are sometimes so thin with advertising and editorial pages as to look like brochures.
Nicholas Coleridge, the outgoing chairman of Condé Nast Britain, recently published a memoir about the 30-year golden period for magazines, beginning in the 1980s, when ad revenue and circulation climbed year after year and editors brimmed with creative gusto. He titled it “The Glossy Years.” In 2017, the United States arm of Condé Nast lost more than $120 million and, to stem the bleeding, the publisher has closed or sold off several titles and subleased floors in its Lower Manhattan headquarters. New York magazine asked, What’s left of Condé Nast, even as it faces an uncertain future under Vox Media, its new owner. Rivals Hearst and Meredith face similar challenges.
If one could even sell a magazine memoir of today, it might be called “The Getting-By Years”: slashed budgets, reduced staffs, a noticeable diminishing of not just financial resources but ambition and copy-editing.
Except at The World of Interiors, which has lost none of its gloss and seems utterly unaffected by modern media trends. Other than a cursory if reasonably popular Instagram presence and website of inspirational indices, it’s not really on the internet, or trying limply to be “of” the internet as so many other legacy titles are.
“It enjoys a semi-indie status among our titles,” said Albert Read, the managing director of Condé Nast Britain. The people who produce it, he said, “are all artistic bohemian types. It’s the antithesis to the data-driven digital attitude that we have to embrace in other part of our business.”
Sitting in his wood-paneled office inside Vogue House, the publisher’s London headquarters, Mr. Read held up the October issue of The World of Interiors. It was thick as a phone book with ads and printed on heavy 100-gram wood-free coated paper, the most luscious, most expensive paper of any Condé title. The cover was a simple, enticing photo of the shaded veranda of a house in the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago off the coast of northwest Africa, with barely any typeface to muck it up.
“It’s just such a beautiful thing,” Mr. Read said, biased but not wrong.
The magazine’s readership is small, with a circulation of 55,000, but influential. It’s beloved by those in the creative and visual arts especially. Clare Waight Keller, the artistic director of Givenchy; Nicolas Ghesquière, Louis Vuitton’s creative director, whose Paris apartment was featured in the December 2012 issue; Alessandro Michele, the fashion director for Gucci, who uses The World of Interiors as inspiration for his collections — all longtime readers. So are Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and the photographer Tim Walker.
Christopher Bailey, the president and former chief creative officer of Burberry, said that while The World of Interiors appeals to the fashion crowd, it’s not fashionable. “I’ve read magazines all my relatively grown-up life. And World of Interiors is the only magazine that I’ve kept and trooped around the world wherever I’ve lived,” he said. “There’s something about it that does not feel throwaway. It’s not trend-driven. It’s not of the moment.”
Those who work in magazines read The World of Interiors with a mix of appreciation and envy. In an age when editors of monthlies must compete, seemingly impossibly, with the daily dopamine hits of ’grams and memes and TikToks, The World of Interiors appears to occupy an earlier, more dignified era.
Founded in 1981, The World of Interiors now breaks every dumb rule of modern magazines. There are no celebrities on the cover (and rarely any inside). You don’t feel the hand of advertisers, publicists or digital panic on every page. The design is low-key, almost academic, without gimmicky typeface or colors pushed so that everything looks Disney fake. In fact, the photography is rather moody and in chiaroscuro tones, giving the empty furnished rooms a compelling, dreamlike quality.
The World of Interiors isn’t concerned with showing readers how to achieve such-and-such a look or selling an aspirational dream. Who expects to one day live in the Queen Mother’s former residence? Still, the magazine has never come across as snobby, because three pages after Clarence House can come, say, the house-turned-museum that an African-American couple, a poet and her postal-worker husband, built in Lynchburg, Va., in 1903 and decorated with recycled materials and great flair. Or an ice hotel in Sweden. Or a mobile home.
The magazine’s point-of-view is distinct, even wacky. And inventive: Though product pages typically consist of clip art on a white background, The World of Interiors will collect the latest fabrics and drape them across a farm field in the Cotswolds.
Print is dead. Only it isn’t. How does The World of Interiors still exist?
The World of Interiors is produced in a corner of the second floor of Vogue House, the publisher’s drably charming brown-brick building in central London. The office is one largish room with deeply scuffed wood floors, a drop ceiling and windows overlooking green Hanover Square. On a recent morning, the magazine’s editor, Rupert Thomas, was meeting with the art director, Mark Lazenby, to finalize feature layouts for an upcoming issue.
The men stood in the center of the office over a white tabletop that, on closer inspection, revealed itself to be a dormant light box for viewing photographic transparencies. No other magazine in the building, or practically anywhere else, used a light box anymore, having switched to digital photography.
“We still commission on film,” said Mr. Thomas, a note of pride in his voice.
The light box, along with the shelves and desk cubbies stuffed with books and the paperwork lying everywhere, gave the impression of a publishing office from an earlier time — if not the days of clacking typewriters then the ’90s at least, when producing a magazine was more tactile and everyone’s main concern was what would go into next month’s issue, not whether there would be one.
A thin, bespectacled man of 53, Mr. Thomas had on wool trousers paired with a green corduroy blazer and blue cloth tie, and exuded an air of bookish intelligence and modest British eccentricity. If he wasn’t a magazine editor, you could imagine him teaching the Bloomsbury Group to students at a gently rundown art school.
Mr. Thomas grew up in public housing in north London (his mother was a costumer) and joined the staff of The World of Interiors as a junior editor in 1992, after working for the art-book publishers Thames & Hudson and Dorling Kindersley. He became editor in 2000, only the second in the magazine’s 38-year history.
His predecessor and the founding editor, Min Hogg, was a formidable figure whose father was the ear, nose and throat physician to the Queen Mother, and who ran with a bohemian London “in” crowd, including the actor Rupert Everett and the social gadfly and decorator Nicky Haslam.
When Ms. Hogg died at age 80 this past June, the staff decorated the church where her memorial was held with 10-foot lavender gingham bows running to the altar. The World of Interiors also republished her Canary Islands home on the cover and carried a two-page dedication to her life by Mr. Thomas, who credited Ms. Hogg with defining the magazine’s approach (“‘Everything from palaces to pigsties’”) and with keeping it free from business-side meddling (“The much-quoted anecdote of Min throwing an ashtray at a hapless publisher is true…”). It was Ms. Hogg who essentially invented, through the magazine’s exquisitely crumbled aesthetic, the decorating style shabby chic.
Mr. Thomas showed off what would be his office, had he chosen to sit apart from his staff and not at a cluttered desk alongside them following the example set by his predecessor. The adjacent room held a worktable strewn with fabric swatches, a sewing machine, back issues of the magazine, clothes on hangars, rolls of wallpaper stuffed into a closet.
“This is our Jackson Pollock workroom,” Mr. Thomas said, a reference to the dried paint splatters on the threadbare carpet.
Although Vogue House is shopworn on the whole, with old elevators and an in-house canteen employees call “the Hatch,” the World of Interiors office has a different degree of make-do, in keeping with its history. It wasn’t started by Condé Nast, but rather bought by the company back when it was published independently as Interiors and headquartered above a florist’s shop on Fulham Road.
For years after, The World of Interiors shared office space with the Condé Nast circulation department in another building across town, leaving it physically and metaphorically apart. If the magazine wasn’t given great infusions of cash like its siblings, it was left largely alone by the executives, a trade-off that continues to this day and one Mr. Thomas, like Ms. Hogg before him, seems happy with.
Mr. Thomas drank a cup of tea at the messy worktable and reflected on the industry’s “golden, halcyon days,” as he put it, when 25 models and 15 hair-and-makeup stylists would be flown to a glamorous and remote location for a shoot. “But we were never like that,” he said. “We’ve always been done on a shoestring.”
The World of Interiors has a tiny staff of 13, many of whom have worked there for years, aging happily in place, after arriving in roundabout ways. Jessica Hayns, a 26-year veteran who as creative director oversees the fabric and furniture shoots, was formerly a textile designer. Carol Prisant, the New York editor, was an antique dealer who’d never written for magazines before she penned a query letter to Ms. Hogg and was hired, in 1989. All are skillful at multitasking and undaunted by traveling economy.
If Simon Upton, one of the magazine’s star freelance photographers, is dispatched to the United States, he will be assigned two or three projects to make the trip cost-effective. And Mr. Upton travels light, which can flummox subjects accustomed to how other shelter magazines operate.
Michelle R. Smith, an interior designer whose Brooklyn townhouse was featured in the February 2018 issue, recalled getting a last-minute email from the magazine saying Mr. Upton was in New York and could he come the next day?
“I’m freaking out. Clearly there’s no stylist, no flowers,” Ms. Smith recalled, referring to the practice of primping a home before it’s photographed. The World of Interiors, by contrast, considers its mission to capture a truthful record of how people live, usually under natural light. As a bonus, the magazine saves thousands on equipment rentals and florists’ bills.
Ms. Smith went on: “He just showed up by himself with a tiny bag. He said, ‘Don’t move anything.’ Do you want me to remove the remote control? ‘No.’ My sneakers are where I left them. The only styling I did was hide wires.”
It’s common for magazines to commission stories only to kill them for one reason or another. Vogue and Vanity Fair are famous for the practice. The World of Interiors can’t afford such waste, so Mr. Thomas and his staff have developed a way of art-directing stories in advance, to work confidently and efficiently.
Ms. Prisant described the process: “Rupert asks me to provide pictures of the four walls of a room that I might find interesting. Stand in the middle, turn in a circle and get the four walls. He lays out the whole shoot from England from that series of photographs. We can do a major shoot in a day.”
Mr. Thomas said, “There’s something better than throwing money at a situation. And that’s throwing thought at it. You have to keep an eye on everything. Every crop of every picture. Every penny spent. You’re totally involved in the product. It’s never been enough for me to cruise through it and say, ‘They won’t notice.’ World of Interiors readers notice everything. And they write and tell you.”
Like his staff, Mr. Thomas is frugal and workmanlike. He is not a celebrity editor in the Anna Wintour mold. His partner is Alan Bennett, the famous playwright and author of “The History Boys,” making him part of a London power couple, though he is loath to discuss his private life, or much else, with reporters. He rarely gives interviews, and The World of Interiors, unlike most magazines, doesn’t carry an editor’s letter or entreaties to follow him on social media.
“Rupert’s not in it for the flash of Condé Nast or the Mercedes purring outside waiting to take him somewhere,” said Mr. Read, his boss. “He gets on the tube with his backpack. He conforms to this purist, almost monastic approach to the magazine.”
When the digital-advertising apocalypse came for print in the last decade, gutting budgets along with staffs, The World of Interiors scarcely had to adjust. Budgets were neither reduced nor increased. And as always, the money scrimped from places where it didn’t show was spent in areas where it did, like continuing to shoot on film, printing on sumptuous paper and twice a year shipping a huge amount of furniture to Italy to be photographed inside a rented villa or castle.
As other magazines were forced to cut corners, or cannibalize their print editions to feed the web, The World of Interiors grew lusher and more thoughtful by comparison. “The attention that goes into the photo captions — it’s a dying art,” said Fritz Karch, an antique dealer in New Jersey who used to work at Martha Stewart Living magazine and has read The World of Interiors since the mid-80s. “I have a friend who will quote his favorites. Because where today are you going to read, ‘Dried whippet over dusty silverware?’”
The Instagram account was introduced well after the social media platform became popular, and only upon careful consideration of how to approach the medium, said Emma Redmayne, the magazine’s publisher. Very few stories are available on its website. To experience The World of Interiors, you still have to buy the print magazine.
In October, the magazine unveiled The World of Interiors Index, an online directory of antique dealers, gallerists, upholsters and the like that will generate no great fortunes for Condé Nast. But readers and advertisers enjoy The World of Interiors as a print object. And it makes money as a print object, especially in Britain where there is still a robust newsstand culture and an appreciation for print (In 2019, ad revenue for The World of Interiors outperformed the market, Ms. Redmayne said. And with 43 percent of total circulation coming from subscriptions, it boasts the most loyal subscribers of any Condé title).
So why start churning out clickbait like “5 Ways to Get the ‘Downton Abbey’ Look?” The World of Interiors is meant for a niche audience and the people who run it are fine with that.
“It’s so successful as a business, and so solid, that I’m very wary of pushing them in directions they feel uncomfortable going in,” said Mr. Read. “I mean, if the World of Interiors circulation suddenly jumped to 150,000, I’d almost be worried.”
All of which leaves Mr. Thomas in the unique position of editing a print magazine with a rosy future.
“Our specialness is that we rather buck the trend,” he said. “In a very weird way, by being willfully noncommercial, we’ve made ourselves more commercial. If that makes sense.”
source | nytimes
By Steven Kurutz
Dec. 4, 2019, 4:10 p.m. ET
LONDON — To be a magazine reader these days is to lament — unless you are reading The World of Interiors, published since 1982 by Condé Nast Britain but widely available on American newsstands, where it sells for $9.99 per issue.
The World of Interiors is essentially a decorating magazine, but this is like saying Vogue concerns itself with sewing. It showcases seemingly every facet of the decorative arts and crafts over centuries, from the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s Manhattan studio to an antique dealer’s 16th-century Shropshire pile to a shepherd’s hut, while reviewing books like “The People’s Galleries: Art Museums and Exhibitions in Britain 1800-1914.” It’s intelligent, witty and wide-ranging in its curiosity: a bible.
And a rarity.
Two decades after the internet changed everything, magazines mostly have yet to figure out how to thrive in a digital world. Details and Domino folded. Glamour, Seventeen, Vibe, Self and Playboy have either retreated from print altogether or appear on newsstands infrequently. Titles once so culturally influential they created mythologies around them — Time, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone — have been supplanted by social media and blogs, and are sometimes so thin with advertising and editorial pages as to look like brochures.
Nicholas Coleridge, the outgoing chairman of Condé Nast Britain, recently published a memoir about the 30-year golden period for magazines, beginning in the 1980s, when ad revenue and circulation climbed year after year and editors brimmed with creative gusto. He titled it “The Glossy Years.” In 2017, the United States arm of Condé Nast lost more than $120 million and, to stem the bleeding, the publisher has closed or sold off several titles and subleased floors in its Lower Manhattan headquarters. New York magazine asked, What’s left of Condé Nast, even as it faces an uncertain future under Vox Media, its new owner. Rivals Hearst and Meredith face similar challenges.
If one could even sell a magazine memoir of today, it might be called “The Getting-By Years”: slashed budgets, reduced staffs, a noticeable diminishing of not just financial resources but ambition and copy-editing.
Except at The World of Interiors, which has lost none of its gloss and seems utterly unaffected by modern media trends. Other than a cursory if reasonably popular Instagram presence and website of inspirational indices, it’s not really on the internet, or trying limply to be “of” the internet as so many other legacy titles are.
“It enjoys a semi-indie status among our titles,” said Albert Read, the managing director of Condé Nast Britain. The people who produce it, he said, “are all artistic bohemian types. It’s the antithesis to the data-driven digital attitude that we have to embrace in other part of our business.”
Sitting in his wood-paneled office inside Vogue House, the publisher’s London headquarters, Mr. Read held up the October issue of The World of Interiors. It was thick as a phone book with ads and printed on heavy 100-gram wood-free coated paper, the most luscious, most expensive paper of any Condé title. The cover was a simple, enticing photo of the shaded veranda of a house in the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago off the coast of northwest Africa, with barely any typeface to muck it up.
“It’s just such a beautiful thing,” Mr. Read said, biased but not wrong.
The magazine’s readership is small, with a circulation of 55,000, but influential. It’s beloved by those in the creative and visual arts especially. Clare Waight Keller, the artistic director of Givenchy; Nicolas Ghesquière, Louis Vuitton’s creative director, whose Paris apartment was featured in the December 2012 issue; Alessandro Michele, the fashion director for Gucci, who uses The World of Interiors as inspiration for his collections — all longtime readers. So are Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and the photographer Tim Walker.
Christopher Bailey, the president and former chief creative officer of Burberry, said that while The World of Interiors appeals to the fashion crowd, it’s not fashionable. “I’ve read magazines all my relatively grown-up life. And World of Interiors is the only magazine that I’ve kept and trooped around the world wherever I’ve lived,” he said. “There’s something about it that does not feel throwaway. It’s not trend-driven. It’s not of the moment.”
Those who work in magazines read The World of Interiors with a mix of appreciation and envy. In an age when editors of monthlies must compete, seemingly impossibly, with the daily dopamine hits of ’grams and memes and TikToks, The World of Interiors appears to occupy an earlier, more dignified era.
Founded in 1981, The World of Interiors now breaks every dumb rule of modern magazines. There are no celebrities on the cover (and rarely any inside). You don’t feel the hand of advertisers, publicists or digital panic on every page. The design is low-key, almost academic, without gimmicky typeface or colors pushed so that everything looks Disney fake. In fact, the photography is rather moody and in chiaroscuro tones, giving the empty furnished rooms a compelling, dreamlike quality.
The World of Interiors isn’t concerned with showing readers how to achieve such-and-such a look or selling an aspirational dream. Who expects to one day live in the Queen Mother’s former residence? Still, the magazine has never come across as snobby, because three pages after Clarence House can come, say, the house-turned-museum that an African-American couple, a poet and her postal-worker husband, built in Lynchburg, Va., in 1903 and decorated with recycled materials and great flair. Or an ice hotel in Sweden. Or a mobile home.
The magazine’s point-of-view is distinct, even wacky. And inventive: Though product pages typically consist of clip art on a white background, The World of Interiors will collect the latest fabrics and drape them across a farm field in the Cotswolds.
Print is dead. Only it isn’t. How does The World of Interiors still exist?
The World of Interiors is produced in a corner of the second floor of Vogue House, the publisher’s drably charming brown-brick building in central London. The office is one largish room with deeply scuffed wood floors, a drop ceiling and windows overlooking green Hanover Square. On a recent morning, the magazine’s editor, Rupert Thomas, was meeting with the art director, Mark Lazenby, to finalize feature layouts for an upcoming issue.
The men stood in the center of the office over a white tabletop that, on closer inspection, revealed itself to be a dormant light box for viewing photographic transparencies. No other magazine in the building, or practically anywhere else, used a light box anymore, having switched to digital photography.
“We still commission on film,” said Mr. Thomas, a note of pride in his voice.
The light box, along with the shelves and desk cubbies stuffed with books and the paperwork lying everywhere, gave the impression of a publishing office from an earlier time — if not the days of clacking typewriters then the ’90s at least, when producing a magazine was more tactile and everyone’s main concern was what would go into next month’s issue, not whether there would be one.
A thin, bespectacled man of 53, Mr. Thomas had on wool trousers paired with a green corduroy blazer and blue cloth tie, and exuded an air of bookish intelligence and modest British eccentricity. If he wasn’t a magazine editor, you could imagine him teaching the Bloomsbury Group to students at a gently rundown art school.
Mr. Thomas grew up in public housing in north London (his mother was a costumer) and joined the staff of The World of Interiors as a junior editor in 1992, after working for the art-book publishers Thames & Hudson and Dorling Kindersley. He became editor in 2000, only the second in the magazine’s 38-year history.
His predecessor and the founding editor, Min Hogg, was a formidable figure whose father was the ear, nose and throat physician to the Queen Mother, and who ran with a bohemian London “in” crowd, including the actor Rupert Everett and the social gadfly and decorator Nicky Haslam.
When Ms. Hogg died at age 80 this past June, the staff decorated the church where her memorial was held with 10-foot lavender gingham bows running to the altar. The World of Interiors also republished her Canary Islands home on the cover and carried a two-page dedication to her life by Mr. Thomas, who credited Ms. Hogg with defining the magazine’s approach (“‘Everything from palaces to pigsties’”) and with keeping it free from business-side meddling (“The much-quoted anecdote of Min throwing an ashtray at a hapless publisher is true…”). It was Ms. Hogg who essentially invented, through the magazine’s exquisitely crumbled aesthetic, the decorating style shabby chic.
Mr. Thomas showed off what would be his office, had he chosen to sit apart from his staff and not at a cluttered desk alongside them following the example set by his predecessor. The adjacent room held a worktable strewn with fabric swatches, a sewing machine, back issues of the magazine, clothes on hangars, rolls of wallpaper stuffed into a closet.
“This is our Jackson Pollock workroom,” Mr. Thomas said, a reference to the dried paint splatters on the threadbare carpet.
Although Vogue House is shopworn on the whole, with old elevators and an in-house canteen employees call “the Hatch,” the World of Interiors office has a different degree of make-do, in keeping with its history. It wasn’t started by Condé Nast, but rather bought by the company back when it was published independently as Interiors and headquartered above a florist’s shop on Fulham Road.
For years after, The World of Interiors shared office space with the Condé Nast circulation department in another building across town, leaving it physically and metaphorically apart. If the magazine wasn’t given great infusions of cash like its siblings, it was left largely alone by the executives, a trade-off that continues to this day and one Mr. Thomas, like Ms. Hogg before him, seems happy with.
Mr. Thomas drank a cup of tea at the messy worktable and reflected on the industry’s “golden, halcyon days,” as he put it, when 25 models and 15 hair-and-makeup stylists would be flown to a glamorous and remote location for a shoot. “But we were never like that,” he said. “We’ve always been done on a shoestring.”
The World of Interiors has a tiny staff of 13, many of whom have worked there for years, aging happily in place, after arriving in roundabout ways. Jessica Hayns, a 26-year veteran who as creative director oversees the fabric and furniture shoots, was formerly a textile designer. Carol Prisant, the New York editor, was an antique dealer who’d never written for magazines before she penned a query letter to Ms. Hogg and was hired, in 1989. All are skillful at multitasking and undaunted by traveling economy.
If Simon Upton, one of the magazine’s star freelance photographers, is dispatched to the United States, he will be assigned two or three projects to make the trip cost-effective. And Mr. Upton travels light, which can flummox subjects accustomed to how other shelter magazines operate.
Michelle R. Smith, an interior designer whose Brooklyn townhouse was featured in the February 2018 issue, recalled getting a last-minute email from the magazine saying Mr. Upton was in New York and could he come the next day?
“I’m freaking out. Clearly there’s no stylist, no flowers,” Ms. Smith recalled, referring to the practice of primping a home before it’s photographed. The World of Interiors, by contrast, considers its mission to capture a truthful record of how people live, usually under natural light. As a bonus, the magazine saves thousands on equipment rentals and florists’ bills.
Ms. Smith went on: “He just showed up by himself with a tiny bag. He said, ‘Don’t move anything.’ Do you want me to remove the remote control? ‘No.’ My sneakers are where I left them. The only styling I did was hide wires.”
It’s common for magazines to commission stories only to kill them for one reason or another. Vogue and Vanity Fair are famous for the practice. The World of Interiors can’t afford such waste, so Mr. Thomas and his staff have developed a way of art-directing stories in advance, to work confidently and efficiently.
Ms. Prisant described the process: “Rupert asks me to provide pictures of the four walls of a room that I might find interesting. Stand in the middle, turn in a circle and get the four walls. He lays out the whole shoot from England from that series of photographs. We can do a major shoot in a day.”
Mr. Thomas said, “There’s something better than throwing money at a situation. And that’s throwing thought at it. You have to keep an eye on everything. Every crop of every picture. Every penny spent. You’re totally involved in the product. It’s never been enough for me to cruise through it and say, ‘They won’t notice.’ World of Interiors readers notice everything. And they write and tell you.”
Like his staff, Mr. Thomas is frugal and workmanlike. He is not a celebrity editor in the Anna Wintour mold. His partner is Alan Bennett, the famous playwright and author of “The History Boys,” making him part of a London power couple, though he is loath to discuss his private life, or much else, with reporters. He rarely gives interviews, and The World of Interiors, unlike most magazines, doesn’t carry an editor’s letter or entreaties to follow him on social media.
“Rupert’s not in it for the flash of Condé Nast or the Mercedes purring outside waiting to take him somewhere,” said Mr. Read, his boss. “He gets on the tube with his backpack. He conforms to this purist, almost monastic approach to the magazine.”
When the digital-advertising apocalypse came for print in the last decade, gutting budgets along with staffs, The World of Interiors scarcely had to adjust. Budgets were neither reduced nor increased. And as always, the money scrimped from places where it didn’t show was spent in areas where it did, like continuing to shoot on film, printing on sumptuous paper and twice a year shipping a huge amount of furniture to Italy to be photographed inside a rented villa or castle.
As other magazines were forced to cut corners, or cannibalize their print editions to feed the web, The World of Interiors grew lusher and more thoughtful by comparison. “The attention that goes into the photo captions — it’s a dying art,” said Fritz Karch, an antique dealer in New Jersey who used to work at Martha Stewart Living magazine and has read The World of Interiors since the mid-80s. “I have a friend who will quote his favorites. Because where today are you going to read, ‘Dried whippet over dusty silverware?’”
The Instagram account was introduced well after the social media platform became popular, and only upon careful consideration of how to approach the medium, said Emma Redmayne, the magazine’s publisher. Very few stories are available on its website. To experience The World of Interiors, you still have to buy the print magazine.
In October, the magazine unveiled The World of Interiors Index, an online directory of antique dealers, gallerists, upholsters and the like that will generate no great fortunes for Condé Nast. But readers and advertisers enjoy The World of Interiors as a print object. And it makes money as a print object, especially in Britain where there is still a robust newsstand culture and an appreciation for print (In 2019, ad revenue for The World of Interiors outperformed the market, Ms. Redmayne said. And with 43 percent of total circulation coming from subscriptions, it boasts the most loyal subscribers of any Condé title).
So why start churning out clickbait like “5 Ways to Get the ‘Downton Abbey’ Look?” The World of Interiors is meant for a niche audience and the people who run it are fine with that.
“It’s so successful as a business, and so solid, that I’m very wary of pushing them in directions they feel uncomfortable going in,” said Mr. Read. “I mean, if the World of Interiors circulation suddenly jumped to 150,000, I’d almost be worried.”
All of which leaves Mr. Thomas in the unique position of editing a print magazine with a rosy future.
“Our specialness is that we rather buck the trend,” he said. “In a very weird way, by being willfully noncommercial, we’ve made ourselves more commercial. If that makes sense.”
source | nytimes
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The Glossy Years by Nicholas Coleridge review – the rise and rise of a gilded youth
Anthony Quinn
Sun 20 Oct 2019 04.00 EDT
Condé Nast supremo Nicholas Coleridge’s autobiography reveals a genial figure not afraid to name-drop
While I would never look down on someone just because he’d been to Eton, there are times in Nicholas Coleridge’s memoir when one’s appetite for tales of the gilded life is sorely tried. Committee man and genial godhead of the Condé Nast magazine empire in its pomp, Coleridge swans and swanks about his Arcadian years with just enough self-deprecation to save him from being insufferable. But it’s a close-run thing.
Equipped with the instincts and enthusiasms of a good journalist, he knows how to tell a story and when to move things along. The best part of The Glossy Years doesn’t involve his career at all – it’s his schooldays, usually the period of a memoir I find least involving. Born into a Forsyte-ish clan of moneyed patricians (his father was chairman of Lloyd’s), Coleridge describes his time as a deeply unpromising prep-school boy with a Waugh-like sense of the ludicrous. Without a gift for anything but scripture, “I was soon firmly embedded in the dimwits’ stream, along with barely English-fluent sons of ambassadors and a pair of bedwetting twins”. Later, at Eton, he and his great pal Craig Brown, another divinity scholar, slip bogus verses “from Isaiah or Ezekiel” into their essays and get a big tick from teachers who don’t bother to check the sources. Happy days and so long ago (early 1970s) that their other mate Charles Moore, future biographer of Mrs Thatcher, was canvassing for the Liberals.
And how about this for a reminder of those barely credible times? Having squeaked into Trinity College, Cambridge, to read theology, Coleridge is invited by the master to a meet-and-greet for the alumni of “the top public schools”, where champagne is served. It transpires there are two more such parties, the second for those from the lesser public schools and grammars, where it’s red and white wine. The third is for the state sector, who would be served beer and cider. “It says a lot about us – and nothing good – that I don’t remember any of us finding anything odd in this arrangement.” It says quite a lot about Coleridge’s honesty that he mentions this at all. Many wouldn’t have. He is quite a strange mixture: in one way, the signet-ringed toff, in another, the raffish bohemian – like his hero David Bowie he took mime lessons from Lindsay Kemp. One detects a strain of camp in him not standard issue for his class.
The combination won him admirers. At Harpers & Queen, he was taken under the wing of the inimitable Ann Barr (though he somehow fails to namecheck her beloved parrot, Turkey) and later helped Tina Brown transform Tatler from the in-house mag of deb-collectors and dowager aunts into a sleek, new “upper-class comic”. His cheek and his connections propel him onward. Hired by the Evening Standard as a feature writer, he got his first story at a birthday party in Windsor Castle, not among the chinless guests but by disguising himself in cap and uniform to hang out with the chauffeurs downstairs as they bitched and gossiped about their bosses. I had forgotten that it was Coleridge who also got the “14 pints a day” scoop from William Hague. Eventually, the siren call of the glossies lured him back: “I have always liked magazine people, with their defining characteristics of faddishness, alertness and a predilection for diva-like behaviour.” The feeling has plainly been mutual.
As he rises to the top of the tree at Condé Nast, a blizzard of name-dropping sets in; the tone becomes more diplomatic and the book somewhat less interesting. For all his mischief, Coleridge is a company man right down to his (I’m guessing) monogrammed underpants and he won’t risk offending his influential circle. He isn’t a scintillating portraitist, even when his heroes are on view. He gets to see Bowie at Wembley and has this to say: “The show was brilliant, he played all the classic tracks.” He also has a bit of a tin ear. He recalls that the late GQ style editor John Morgan, who was gay, teetered on the brink of coming out “but never quite took the plunge”, an unfortunate expression, given the tragic thing about Morgan was that he fell or jumped to his death from his flat.
He is gracious in paying tribute to his various PAs, nannies, colleagues, friends and wife (a psychic healer). And it’s hard to resist his Woosterish amiability. I was once leaving a London party with a friend, the exit being a long walk down to the road. As we set off, a chauffeur-driven Daimler stopped, the passenger door opened and Coleridge popped his head out: “Can I give you a lift?” We were perfect strangers but he budged up and we got in. I don’t recall anything we said – only his pinstripe suit, a mirthful air and a grin like a friendly alligator’s.
• The Glossy Years by Nicholas Coleridge is published by Penguin (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
source | theguardian
Anthony Quinn
Sun 20 Oct 2019 04.00 EDT
Condé Nast supremo Nicholas Coleridge’s autobiography reveals a genial figure not afraid to name-drop
While I would never look down on someone just because he’d been to Eton, there are times in Nicholas Coleridge’s memoir when one’s appetite for tales of the gilded life is sorely tried. Committee man and genial godhead of the Condé Nast magazine empire in its pomp, Coleridge swans and swanks about his Arcadian years with just enough self-deprecation to save him from being insufferable. But it’s a close-run thing.
Equipped with the instincts and enthusiasms of a good journalist, he knows how to tell a story and when to move things along. The best part of The Glossy Years doesn’t involve his career at all – it’s his schooldays, usually the period of a memoir I find least involving. Born into a Forsyte-ish clan of moneyed patricians (his father was chairman of Lloyd’s), Coleridge describes his time as a deeply unpromising prep-school boy with a Waugh-like sense of the ludicrous. Without a gift for anything but scripture, “I was soon firmly embedded in the dimwits’ stream, along with barely English-fluent sons of ambassadors and a pair of bedwetting twins”. Later, at Eton, he and his great pal Craig Brown, another divinity scholar, slip bogus verses “from Isaiah or Ezekiel” into their essays and get a big tick from teachers who don’t bother to check the sources. Happy days and so long ago (early 1970s) that their other mate Charles Moore, future biographer of Mrs Thatcher, was canvassing for the Liberals.
And how about this for a reminder of those barely credible times? Having squeaked into Trinity College, Cambridge, to read theology, Coleridge is invited by the master to a meet-and-greet for the alumni of “the top public schools”, where champagne is served. It transpires there are two more such parties, the second for those from the lesser public schools and grammars, where it’s red and white wine. The third is for the state sector, who would be served beer and cider. “It says a lot about us – and nothing good – that I don’t remember any of us finding anything odd in this arrangement.” It says quite a lot about Coleridge’s honesty that he mentions this at all. Many wouldn’t have. He is quite a strange mixture: in one way, the signet-ringed toff, in another, the raffish bohemian – like his hero David Bowie he took mime lessons from Lindsay Kemp. One detects a strain of camp in him not standard issue for his class.
The combination won him admirers. At Harpers & Queen, he was taken under the wing of the inimitable Ann Barr (though he somehow fails to namecheck her beloved parrot, Turkey) and later helped Tina Brown transform Tatler from the in-house mag of deb-collectors and dowager aunts into a sleek, new “upper-class comic”. His cheek and his connections propel him onward. Hired by the Evening Standard as a feature writer, he got his first story at a birthday party in Windsor Castle, not among the chinless guests but by disguising himself in cap and uniform to hang out with the chauffeurs downstairs as they bitched and gossiped about their bosses. I had forgotten that it was Coleridge who also got the “14 pints a day” scoop from William Hague. Eventually, the siren call of the glossies lured him back: “I have always liked magazine people, with their defining characteristics of faddishness, alertness and a predilection for diva-like behaviour.” The feeling has plainly been mutual.
As he rises to the top of the tree at Condé Nast, a blizzard of name-dropping sets in; the tone becomes more diplomatic and the book somewhat less interesting. For all his mischief, Coleridge is a company man right down to his (I’m guessing) monogrammed underpants and he won’t risk offending his influential circle. He isn’t a scintillating portraitist, even when his heroes are on view. He gets to see Bowie at Wembley and has this to say: “The show was brilliant, he played all the classic tracks.” He also has a bit of a tin ear. He recalls that the late GQ style editor John Morgan, who was gay, teetered on the brink of coming out “but never quite took the plunge”, an unfortunate expression, given the tragic thing about Morgan was that he fell or jumped to his death from his flat.
He is gracious in paying tribute to his various PAs, nannies, colleagues, friends and wife (a psychic healer). And it’s hard to resist his Woosterish amiability. I was once leaving a London party with a friend, the exit being a long walk down to the road. As we set off, a chauffeur-driven Daimler stopped, the passenger door opened and Coleridge popped his head out: “Can I give you a lift?” We were perfect strangers but he budged up and we got in. I don’t recall anything we said – only his pinstripe suit, a mirthful air and a grin like a friendly alligator’s.
• The Glossy Years by Nicholas Coleridge is published by Penguin (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
source | theguardian
