Xone
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wow ok, Thank You!...
The Business of Magazines
- Thread starter Cicciolina
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caioherrero
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Wow, love Alex. Nice move to anima. Her magazine now will be relevant.
nyc_art_style
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Kate Lanphear has left Marie Claire
Source: Daily Front Row
Source: Daily Front Row
caioherrero
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I think she was fired. This too bad. I love her work and vision.
nyc_art_style
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I hope she's going to Bazaar. The timing is too suspicious. She was EIC of a magazine already. Playing second fiddle at Marie Claire seemed like a career regression to me. Now I can only imagined she accepted that knowing bigger things would come her way later down the line.
I don't buy that Hearst doesn't have a short list for the EIC role at Bazaar. Every company has a short list for those types of roles.
I love Kate Lanphear. She's produced some amazing work during her career. I would be thrilled to buy Bazaar if it's ran by her.
I don't buy that Hearst doesn't have a short list for the EIC role at Bazaar. Every company has a short list for those types of roles.
I love Kate Lanphear. She's produced some amazing work during her career. I would be thrilled to buy Bazaar if it's ran by her.
caioherrero
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I don’t think it’s her. Why she left and not promoted like Nina and Aya?
Benn98
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Shocked to hear Kate is leaving Marie Claire! The magazine as a whole slowly became what Elle was under Robbie in terms of written content, but Kate really gave it that extra boost with the fashion content. Keen to see where she will pop up.
And below, finally someone who has the balls to be frank about what's wrong with print! Definitely worth reading even though I've certainly never cared for 10 or for Sophia who last said this about Kate Upton: "We (Victoria's Secret) would never use her. She's like a Page Three girl. She's like a footballer's wife, with the too-blonde hair and the kind of face that anyone with enough money can go out and buy"
Media People: Sophia Neophitou-Apostolou of 10 Magazine
With print titles and publishing groups shrivelling, dying or getting sold at knockdown prices, why is this fashion magazine still around after 20 years?
By Samantha Conti on February 6, 2020
LONDON — Nearly everything in Sophia Neophitou-Apostolou’s world is outsized, from her impossibly high Alaïa heels to the coils of black hair so long they spill over her shoulders and into the back of her black Chalayan coat; her big throaty laugh to her ambitions for 10 magazine, the love of her professional life.
Even in London, a city packed with big media personalities, Neophitou-Apostolou stands out. The founder, publisher and editor in chief of 10 oversees her own indie media group, Zac Publishing Ltd., which is named after her son. The glossy magazine comes out twice a year, while 10 Men is also biannual. There’s an editorial web site and an e-commerce site called 10 Curates that sells high-end, high-brow merch ranging from original artwork, to art and photography books to earrings by Delfina Delettrez.
Then there’s 10+, a supersized, deconstructed magazine that launched in late 2018. It comes in its own box modeled on the old yellow ones from Kodak, and has multiple parts, including a stack of giant, fold-out posters based on the title’s lavish photo shoots. Neophitou-Apostolou calls it a “book-a-zine.”
Circulation is 90,000 and it’s entirely self-funded — Neophitou-Apostolou has never taken outside investment. The business, which counts most of the major luxury names as advertisers, is also profitable.
Neophitou-Apostolou, who also works as creative director for Roland Mouret and Antonio Berardi and who served as collection creative director for Victoria’s Secret for a decade, said she can’t afford any vanity projects. Indeed, it’s been such good business that she now owns, among other things, the five-story Georgian town house in London’s Soho that serves as 10’s headquarters.
Neophitou-Apostolou, a Londoner with a proud Greek heritage and a great sense of family, loves being in control. She’s built and maintained her business with one eye on the copy, captions and cover stories, and the other locked onto the advertising and accounting.
Her friend and fellow editor and stylist Katie Grand, who helms the Condé Nast-owned Love, said that in a climate where it’s very hard to be a monthly magazine — or even to consider content to be anything slower than an hourly post — 10 continues “to shine bright.” Grand said the magazine delivers “a strong point of view, led by a very strong woman.”
Neophitou-Apostolou is marking the 20th anniversary of 10 this week with an issue called Best Foot Forward. It is packed with stories around sustainability and bio-design, gender fluidity and youth activism. For the latter, 10 photographed teenagers in their bedrooms, arguing that the floors, walls and tabletops reflect the individual’s soul and aspirations.
“It fixes this moment in time,” she said of the 20th anniversary issue, which is out today with pages of ads from Gucci, Dior, Prada, Fendi, Etro, Hugo Boss and MSGM. During an interview over breakfast at the Beaumont Hotel in Mayfair, she said coming up with the anniversary themes was easy.
“With 10 we have always had those conversations — size diversity, age, gender and color diversity. They have been part of our everyday dialogue, every issue’s dialogue. I think more and more mainstream magazines have finally woken up to the necessity for those things to be part of the norm. They should never have been a separate conversation,” Neophitou-Apostolou said.
Here, in an interview with WWD, she talks about her vision for 10, why it has survived for two decades when so many other titles have failed — and the power of big thinking.
WWD: Why are you still printing a magazine in this digital age?
Sophia Neophitou-Apostolou: My initial incentive for starting the magazine really was quite selfish — I’m not going to lie. I was focused on creating a platform of creative freedom for myself and people like me. There were a few magazines at the time like Dutch, which I love, and Italian Vogue, which I absolutely love. Dazed was around, but it was much younger. I wanted to create a moment of luxury, a moment of aspiration and beauty.
Print still inspires me because it retains an element of the precious. You create images with longevity, a document that represents a moment in time but one that is timeless, too. 10 is less about representing trend, and more about creating inspirational imagery. I feel like I am perpetuating this moment of fantasy, this moment of creativity and within print you have this tangible document that can be referred back to. It’s not disposable, you are not going to see at the doctor or the dentist, it’s something you treasure.
WWD: Who reads 10?
S.N-A: This is the really weird thing. I believed our demographic was 25 to 60 but recently, at fashion shows, more and more younger people have been coming over to me. I didn’t think we were reaching them. Instagram — and our web site — inform a lot of people in different ways. They inspire people to go and delve deep into magazines. A lot of the [younger] people who work for us have come from the London College of Fashion and Saint Martins and they say they go to the library and look for [archive] magazines to read. It’s brilliant, it feels like it has circled back — like people listening to vinyl again. I feel like there is a much more physical desire now to have beautiful product that really does delve deep into lots of topics beyond just, “The trend is yellow.”
WWD: Why have you remained independent for so long?
S.N-A: This is going to sound like I’m a control freak: The thing is that because I am independent, I can often make decisions that, on the face of it, might not seem commercially viable, but I have an absolute conviction and an absolute need to have those discussions. We have never done fur ads, much to my advertising director’s dismay. I just don’t feel like I want to, but I can make those choices because I’m an independent publisher. If I was part of a bigger conversation I wouldn’t have a choice.
With the 20th anniversary issue, the temptation was to create a retrospective, but I don’t want to do that. What I wanted to do — and what we have always done — is to create a platform for new designers, creative and photography so that 10 is constantly changing and morphing.
I have always tried really hard to maintain this independent voice, this attitude of irreverence and I think, honestly, if I’m under the “cosh” of somebody else, I worry about how much autonomy I would be able to have. How much freedom? The reason I began the magazine was for the freedom of speech, visually and with words.
My background was Condé Nast and the British newspapers. At British Vogue I was an intern when Isabella Blow was there, and I realized quite quickly that I wanted an element of creative independence and that the only way I could gain that was to create my own platform for like-minded people.
WWD: It is an unbearably cold climate for magazine publishers right now: In the U.K. alone Glamour has downsized, the local arm of Time Inc. has been sold twice, while Marie Claire has ceased publication after more than three decades. The sun is setting on the big magazine groups. Is the Internet solely to blame?
S.N-A: I came from newspapers, where it was all about speed and agility and recognizing changes quickly and not getting stuck in tradition. A lot of magazines now are having their hands forced because people are choosing differently. Readers have become much more discerning and a lot of magazines’ offerings are no longer qualitative.
Readers would rather spend the 10 pounds on something qualitative than something they are just going to flick through and throw away. I am only here by the grace of those people who want to buy print, keep it, look at it and put it up on their mood boards.
There is also a lot of waste. All of these people on staff at these magazines. What do they do, all of these people? The magazines haven’t made the changes to make themselves profitable early enough. They haven’t identified where the cancer lies, where the waste lies, and they have perpetuated it. Things that shouldn’t have closed down have, and it makes me sad, but still they haven’t changed. That is the bigger issue. They have been resistant to change. It’s like they are in a coma, or floating around in their flotation tank, with the windows and doors closed, oblivious to the changes, oblivious to what is happening.
I have got quite a business approach to my world, because I own it. Every penny misspent, every penny wasted impacts on my business and my business model. I also have people on staff who need to get their salaries. People are on proper salaries and that is something that I have always prided myself on — giving a value to the people that I bring into my world. My team is tiny, there are 10 of us here as opposed to hundreds.
WWD: You all must be great multitaskers.
S.N-A: You have to be multifaceted to succeed today. You have to be willing to roll your sleeves up. I still pack a suitcase, I am a very hands-on editor in chief. I read every single caption. You would be surprised how many people don’t do that.
WWD: In the maelstrom of magazine closures, one that remains standing is Vogue Italia. Tell me about how that title has influenced your work.
S.N-A: I learnt a lot from Franca [Sozzani, the late editor of Vogue Italia]. Franca was an amazing business woman, and so wonderfully brilliant. She never compromised the visual element of the magazine. She created an environment that people were super happy to be part of. It wasn’t the richest Vogue on the planet in terms of what they had to spend, but she had a very responsible attitude to what she was doing and it was almost run like an independent magazine. It was built on creative integrity — something I would never compromise. That is a key to making a good product. We cannot compromise our creative integrity, we just can’t.
WWD: We’ve talked about the readers, publishers and editors. Have the advertisers changed, too?
S.N-A: They want a more qualitative platform, something that is more in-depth, substantial and opinionated rather than “Here’s a page, here’s a credit.” And I do not think they are supporting the monthly dialogue. There will always be monthly magazines, like Vogue, that they support, regardless, but they are more into things like biannuals, bimonthlies. And they are the ones driving the bus.
WWD: That dynamic has completely flipped, hasn’t it? It wasn’t that long ago when magazine editors turned up their noses up at advertiser requests, even after pocketing their money.
S.N-A: There was a level of arrogance and snobbery. I worked at a really big newspaper, and I remember going to Milan, and the editor having this nonchalant attitude like, “You’re lucky if we feature you.” Now the advertisers have the power and can pull advertising [if they are unhappy].
Obviously I have always been an independent publisher so keeping the advertiser happy is very important. I am mindful of respecting their investment — and my environment — and I recognize that in the editorial that I give them. In the past, when other magazines were saying to advertisers, “No, you can’t come and play with us,” I would say, “Welcome to my table, everybody feast!” I think the mentality of the way we function has to change. It has to be more inclusive, it has to be more collaborative.
I think a lot of the young designers, not even just magazine editors or magazine publishers, but even designers now, the ones who will succeed into the future will be the ones that understand collaboration is the key.
WWD: Another dynamic that’s entered into the media fray is the influencer. How do you feel about them taking up space on the front row and grabbing their share of advertisers’ money?
S.N-A: There is a really funny story that I recount quite often. We were in the Tuileries and there was a frenzied activity of people trying to take pictures of someone with a teapot as a hat and some weird mismatched situation going on. Behind them, Jane Birkin was walking, but no one even registered who she was or what she was doing because they were too busy taking the picture of the girl with the teapot on her head.
Influencers are a bit like a sugar rush, the sugar rush of fashion. There are key ones who still represent a really great conversation because they are writers and they are observers and they are not just dressing up with teapots on their heads. There is still a place for the informed influencer, because an informed, eloquent influencer whose actual opinion you care about, is valuable. It’s not just any old random wearing an Instagrammable outfit.
And if the right influencer is chosen to align with a brand, they are winning because people respect them in the industry — and out of the industry — which I think is important.
WWD: What would your advice be to people working in magazines and media right now?
S.N-A: I feel like agility is something that should be injected as an absolute necessity for survival in any field, not just this one. Dodge the bumps. Find ways to avoid the pitfalls. Look ahead. Project forward. Always project forward. Sometimes you do fall foul of some decisions you make, but I feel like I can’t afford to make that many mistakes. I can’t afford to indulge in unnecessary expenditure in my environment in any way. I think if everyone approached what they did as their own business, there would be less waste.
WWD: What about your advice to anyone who’s thinking about starting a magazine today?
S.N-A: If you believe you have got something unique, something specific that you want to do, you have to be convinced that you will do it and you will find solutions to make it happen. People are scared. There is such a big fear culture of failure. I do not fear failure. I am not saying I have never failed or never will fail.
I remember in the very, very beginning I went to the bank to get a loan to [start the magazine] and the bank manager said: “If you were a restaurant you could guarantee me table covers, but you are not and you can’t guarantee me anything.” I just thought, “I’m not going to listen to you,” and so I went off and got a car loan in the same way that Giorgio Armani sold his Beetle and went around with his briefcase, aged 40, to get investment in his business.
In the beginning, people invested based on me as a person. Chanel, Dolce, Cartier all invested, in the very first issue — which is really rare. I didn’t even have a dummy, I had a folder where I just put photocopies in, and people believed in me and my process. Relationships are really important to me.
WWD: What’s next for 10?
S.N-A: I would love it to exist in China and we are having conversations with someone there. The magazine is already in Australia, and I would love it to exist in L.A. There are obviously places where I would like to globalize, but not at the cost of the brand ethos. And I would need to maintain my very specific dialogue. And — because I am a control freak — I would be controlling content constantly.
WWD: Would you ever sell it and move on?
S.N-A: I often have this conversation with my husband. He asks me: “How long do you think…?” and I say, “Indefinitely, because as long as I’m inspired by what I do, I want to continue doing it.” That is my big thing. When I’m not, then I won’t.
WWD
And below, finally someone who has the balls to be frank about what's wrong with print! Definitely worth reading even though I've certainly never cared for 10 or for Sophia who last said this about Kate Upton: "We (Victoria's Secret) would never use her. She's like a Page Three girl. She's like a footballer's wife, with the too-blonde hair and the kind of face that anyone with enough money can go out and buy"
Media People: Sophia Neophitou-Apostolou of 10 Magazine
With print titles and publishing groups shrivelling, dying or getting sold at knockdown prices, why is this fashion magazine still around after 20 years?
By Samantha Conti on February 6, 2020
LONDON — Nearly everything in Sophia Neophitou-Apostolou’s world is outsized, from her impossibly high Alaïa heels to the coils of black hair so long they spill over her shoulders and into the back of her black Chalayan coat; her big throaty laugh to her ambitions for 10 magazine, the love of her professional life.
Even in London, a city packed with big media personalities, Neophitou-Apostolou stands out. The founder, publisher and editor in chief of 10 oversees her own indie media group, Zac Publishing Ltd., which is named after her son. The glossy magazine comes out twice a year, while 10 Men is also biannual. There’s an editorial web site and an e-commerce site called 10 Curates that sells high-end, high-brow merch ranging from original artwork, to art and photography books to earrings by Delfina Delettrez.
Then there’s 10+, a supersized, deconstructed magazine that launched in late 2018. It comes in its own box modeled on the old yellow ones from Kodak, and has multiple parts, including a stack of giant, fold-out posters based on the title’s lavish photo shoots. Neophitou-Apostolou calls it a “book-a-zine.”
Circulation is 90,000 and it’s entirely self-funded — Neophitou-Apostolou has never taken outside investment. The business, which counts most of the major luxury names as advertisers, is also profitable.
Neophitou-Apostolou, who also works as creative director for Roland Mouret and Antonio Berardi and who served as collection creative director for Victoria’s Secret for a decade, said she can’t afford any vanity projects. Indeed, it’s been such good business that she now owns, among other things, the five-story Georgian town house in London’s Soho that serves as 10’s headquarters.
Neophitou-Apostolou, a Londoner with a proud Greek heritage and a great sense of family, loves being in control. She’s built and maintained her business with one eye on the copy, captions and cover stories, and the other locked onto the advertising and accounting.
Her friend and fellow editor and stylist Katie Grand, who helms the Condé Nast-owned Love, said that in a climate where it’s very hard to be a monthly magazine — or even to consider content to be anything slower than an hourly post — 10 continues “to shine bright.” Grand said the magazine delivers “a strong point of view, led by a very strong woman.”
Neophitou-Apostolou is marking the 20th anniversary of 10 this week with an issue called Best Foot Forward. It is packed with stories around sustainability and bio-design, gender fluidity and youth activism. For the latter, 10 photographed teenagers in their bedrooms, arguing that the floors, walls and tabletops reflect the individual’s soul and aspirations.
“It fixes this moment in time,” she said of the 20th anniversary issue, which is out today with pages of ads from Gucci, Dior, Prada, Fendi, Etro, Hugo Boss and MSGM. During an interview over breakfast at the Beaumont Hotel in Mayfair, she said coming up with the anniversary themes was easy.
“With 10 we have always had those conversations — size diversity, age, gender and color diversity. They have been part of our everyday dialogue, every issue’s dialogue. I think more and more mainstream magazines have finally woken up to the necessity for those things to be part of the norm. They should never have been a separate conversation,” Neophitou-Apostolou said.
Here, in an interview with WWD, she talks about her vision for 10, why it has survived for two decades when so many other titles have failed — and the power of big thinking.
WWD: Why are you still printing a magazine in this digital age?
Sophia Neophitou-Apostolou: My initial incentive for starting the magazine really was quite selfish — I’m not going to lie. I was focused on creating a platform of creative freedom for myself and people like me. There were a few magazines at the time like Dutch, which I love, and Italian Vogue, which I absolutely love. Dazed was around, but it was much younger. I wanted to create a moment of luxury, a moment of aspiration and beauty.
Print still inspires me because it retains an element of the precious. You create images with longevity, a document that represents a moment in time but one that is timeless, too. 10 is less about representing trend, and more about creating inspirational imagery. I feel like I am perpetuating this moment of fantasy, this moment of creativity and within print you have this tangible document that can be referred back to. It’s not disposable, you are not going to see at the doctor or the dentist, it’s something you treasure.
WWD: Who reads 10?
S.N-A: This is the really weird thing. I believed our demographic was 25 to 60 but recently, at fashion shows, more and more younger people have been coming over to me. I didn’t think we were reaching them. Instagram — and our web site — inform a lot of people in different ways. They inspire people to go and delve deep into magazines. A lot of the [younger] people who work for us have come from the London College of Fashion and Saint Martins and they say they go to the library and look for [archive] magazines to read. It’s brilliant, it feels like it has circled back — like people listening to vinyl again. I feel like there is a much more physical desire now to have beautiful product that really does delve deep into lots of topics beyond just, “The trend is yellow.”
WWD: Why have you remained independent for so long?
S.N-A: This is going to sound like I’m a control freak: The thing is that because I am independent, I can often make decisions that, on the face of it, might not seem commercially viable, but I have an absolute conviction and an absolute need to have those discussions. We have never done fur ads, much to my advertising director’s dismay. I just don’t feel like I want to, but I can make those choices because I’m an independent publisher. If I was part of a bigger conversation I wouldn’t have a choice.
With the 20th anniversary issue, the temptation was to create a retrospective, but I don’t want to do that. What I wanted to do — and what we have always done — is to create a platform for new designers, creative and photography so that 10 is constantly changing and morphing.
I have always tried really hard to maintain this independent voice, this attitude of irreverence and I think, honestly, if I’m under the “cosh” of somebody else, I worry about how much autonomy I would be able to have. How much freedom? The reason I began the magazine was for the freedom of speech, visually and with words.
My background was Condé Nast and the British newspapers. At British Vogue I was an intern when Isabella Blow was there, and I realized quite quickly that I wanted an element of creative independence and that the only way I could gain that was to create my own platform for like-minded people.
WWD: It is an unbearably cold climate for magazine publishers right now: In the U.K. alone Glamour has downsized, the local arm of Time Inc. has been sold twice, while Marie Claire has ceased publication after more than three decades. The sun is setting on the big magazine groups. Is the Internet solely to blame?
S.N-A: I came from newspapers, where it was all about speed and agility and recognizing changes quickly and not getting stuck in tradition. A lot of magazines now are having their hands forced because people are choosing differently. Readers have become much more discerning and a lot of magazines’ offerings are no longer qualitative.
Readers would rather spend the 10 pounds on something qualitative than something they are just going to flick through and throw away. I am only here by the grace of those people who want to buy print, keep it, look at it and put it up on their mood boards.
There is also a lot of waste. All of these people on staff at these magazines. What do they do, all of these people? The magazines haven’t made the changes to make themselves profitable early enough. They haven’t identified where the cancer lies, where the waste lies, and they have perpetuated it. Things that shouldn’t have closed down have, and it makes me sad, but still they haven’t changed. That is the bigger issue. They have been resistant to change. It’s like they are in a coma, or floating around in their flotation tank, with the windows and doors closed, oblivious to the changes, oblivious to what is happening.
I have got quite a business approach to my world, because I own it. Every penny misspent, every penny wasted impacts on my business and my business model. I also have people on staff who need to get their salaries. People are on proper salaries and that is something that I have always prided myself on — giving a value to the people that I bring into my world. My team is tiny, there are 10 of us here as opposed to hundreds.
WWD: You all must be great multitaskers.
S.N-A: You have to be multifaceted to succeed today. You have to be willing to roll your sleeves up. I still pack a suitcase, I am a very hands-on editor in chief. I read every single caption. You would be surprised how many people don’t do that.
WWD: In the maelstrom of magazine closures, one that remains standing is Vogue Italia. Tell me about how that title has influenced your work.
S.N-A: I learnt a lot from Franca [Sozzani, the late editor of Vogue Italia]. Franca was an amazing business woman, and so wonderfully brilliant. She never compromised the visual element of the magazine. She created an environment that people were super happy to be part of. It wasn’t the richest Vogue on the planet in terms of what they had to spend, but she had a very responsible attitude to what she was doing and it was almost run like an independent magazine. It was built on creative integrity — something I would never compromise. That is a key to making a good product. We cannot compromise our creative integrity, we just can’t.
WWD: We’ve talked about the readers, publishers and editors. Have the advertisers changed, too?
S.N-A: They want a more qualitative platform, something that is more in-depth, substantial and opinionated rather than “Here’s a page, here’s a credit.” And I do not think they are supporting the monthly dialogue. There will always be monthly magazines, like Vogue, that they support, regardless, but they are more into things like biannuals, bimonthlies. And they are the ones driving the bus.
WWD: That dynamic has completely flipped, hasn’t it? It wasn’t that long ago when magazine editors turned up their noses up at advertiser requests, even after pocketing their money.
S.N-A: There was a level of arrogance and snobbery. I worked at a really big newspaper, and I remember going to Milan, and the editor having this nonchalant attitude like, “You’re lucky if we feature you.” Now the advertisers have the power and can pull advertising [if they are unhappy].
Obviously I have always been an independent publisher so keeping the advertiser happy is very important. I am mindful of respecting their investment — and my environment — and I recognize that in the editorial that I give them. In the past, when other magazines were saying to advertisers, “No, you can’t come and play with us,” I would say, “Welcome to my table, everybody feast!” I think the mentality of the way we function has to change. It has to be more inclusive, it has to be more collaborative.
I think a lot of the young designers, not even just magazine editors or magazine publishers, but even designers now, the ones who will succeed into the future will be the ones that understand collaboration is the key.
WWD: Another dynamic that’s entered into the media fray is the influencer. How do you feel about them taking up space on the front row and grabbing their share of advertisers’ money?
S.N-A: There is a really funny story that I recount quite often. We were in the Tuileries and there was a frenzied activity of people trying to take pictures of someone with a teapot as a hat and some weird mismatched situation going on. Behind them, Jane Birkin was walking, but no one even registered who she was or what she was doing because they were too busy taking the picture of the girl with the teapot on her head.
Influencers are a bit like a sugar rush, the sugar rush of fashion. There are key ones who still represent a really great conversation because they are writers and they are observers and they are not just dressing up with teapots on their heads. There is still a place for the informed influencer, because an informed, eloquent influencer whose actual opinion you care about, is valuable. It’s not just any old random wearing an Instagrammable outfit.
And if the right influencer is chosen to align with a brand, they are winning because people respect them in the industry — and out of the industry — which I think is important.
WWD: What would your advice be to people working in magazines and media right now?
S.N-A: I feel like agility is something that should be injected as an absolute necessity for survival in any field, not just this one. Dodge the bumps. Find ways to avoid the pitfalls. Look ahead. Project forward. Always project forward. Sometimes you do fall foul of some decisions you make, but I feel like I can’t afford to make that many mistakes. I can’t afford to indulge in unnecessary expenditure in my environment in any way. I think if everyone approached what they did as their own business, there would be less waste.
WWD: What about your advice to anyone who’s thinking about starting a magazine today?
S.N-A: If you believe you have got something unique, something specific that you want to do, you have to be convinced that you will do it and you will find solutions to make it happen. People are scared. There is such a big fear culture of failure. I do not fear failure. I am not saying I have never failed or never will fail.
I remember in the very, very beginning I went to the bank to get a loan to [start the magazine] and the bank manager said: “If you were a restaurant you could guarantee me table covers, but you are not and you can’t guarantee me anything.” I just thought, “I’m not going to listen to you,” and so I went off and got a car loan in the same way that Giorgio Armani sold his Beetle and went around with his briefcase, aged 40, to get investment in his business.
In the beginning, people invested based on me as a person. Chanel, Dolce, Cartier all invested, in the very first issue — which is really rare. I didn’t even have a dummy, I had a folder where I just put photocopies in, and people believed in me and my process. Relationships are really important to me.
WWD: What’s next for 10?
S.N-A: I would love it to exist in China and we are having conversations with someone there. The magazine is already in Australia, and I would love it to exist in L.A. There are obviously places where I would like to globalize, but not at the cost of the brand ethos. And I would need to maintain my very specific dialogue. And — because I am a control freak — I would be controlling content constantly.
WWD: Would you ever sell it and move on?
S.N-A: I often have this conversation with my husband. He asks me: “How long do you think…?” and I say, “Indefinitely, because as long as I’m inspired by what I do, I want to continue doing it.” That is my big thing. When I’m not, then I won’t.
WWD
tigerrouge
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Part of me has thought for a while that this is the future of print magazines - individuals with the power to create their own niche universe and put it out there, with enough business acumen to ensure it remains profitable, but with enough personality to always insist on a vision, a message of some sort.
Benn98
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Vogue.com's Stuart Emmich on Anna Wintour......explains why we see so much of Kendall on that website.
So what’s Anna like as a boss?
She’s incredibly direct, tells you exactly what she wants and doesn’t want, and is very communicative. If you send her an e-mail, you’ll hear back within five minutes; within half an hour, at most. She’s decisive, and I like that. If I’m doing a great job, tell me, and if I’ve screwed up, tell me. In fact, my first day at the job, I kind of screwed up.
How so?
I began on a Sunday, for the Golden Globes. I texted back and forth with Anna about various people on the carpet, what she liked and didn’t like. I kept e-mailing the editor in charge of our red carpet coverage saying, “Anna isn’t wild about this dress; let’s make sure we include this person, but not this person.” I didn’t realize I delayed the process of getting the slideshow up, because [the team] kept changing the looks. Our slideshow went up two hours late, and our traffic dropped. Anna said to me the next morning, “Why did our traffic drop? Was it because we were talking back and forth?” I said, “Oh, I don’t think so. I’m sure it wasn’t a problem!” Then I found out that was the reason. I understand the process more now. Otherwise, I hear more about things we didn’t do than things we did do: “I saw this story elsewhere. Shouldn’t we be weighing in on it?” The thing about Anna is, she reads everything, so you’re not quite sure what she’s just read and where she’s read it.
Fashionweekdaily
So what’s Anna like as a boss?
She’s incredibly direct, tells you exactly what she wants and doesn’t want, and is very communicative. If you send her an e-mail, you’ll hear back within five minutes; within half an hour, at most. She’s decisive, and I like that. If I’m doing a great job, tell me, and if I’ve screwed up, tell me. In fact, my first day at the job, I kind of screwed up.
How so?
I began on a Sunday, for the Golden Globes. I texted back and forth with Anna about various people on the carpet, what she liked and didn’t like. I kept e-mailing the editor in charge of our red carpet coverage saying, “Anna isn’t wild about this dress; let’s make sure we include this person, but not this person.” I didn’t realize I delayed the process of getting the slideshow up, because [the team] kept changing the looks. Our slideshow went up two hours late, and our traffic dropped. Anna said to me the next morning, “Why did our traffic drop? Was it because we were talking back and forth?” I said, “Oh, I don’t think so. I’m sure it wasn’t a problem!” Then I found out that was the reason. I understand the process more now. Otherwise, I hear more about things we didn’t do than things we did do: “I saw this story elsewhere. Shouldn’t we be weighing in on it?” The thing about Anna is, she reads everything, so you’re not quite sure what she’s just read and where she’s read it.
Fashionweekdaily
Benn98
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On the one hand, you have Hearst struggling to get a replacement (how is this real, in an era where everyone fancies themselves a 'curator'??), and on the flip side there's Anna.... micro-managing even Vogue.com to the point where she decides who and what features on the website (again, in which reality does the EIC of Vogue, consultant of US Conde Nast , and global content advisor of all the international Vogues scrutinise something as minuscule as a 'Kendall Jenner Rocks the Jacquemus Micro Bag' clickbait piece? No wonder magazines are failing. The focus of editors appears to be scattered or elsewhere.
dodencebt
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Anna approves a lot. My experience with Vogue journalists is a very positive one but things take long because there is a lot of back and forth between journalist and editor and often Anna's stamp of approval is needed at the end.
Benn98
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Ugh, that sounds like a nightmare. It's actually a very old English way of working because the reasoning is that everything (good or bad) reflects on the figurehead and not on, say, the writer who wrote a piece. But at some point you really need to let go, it's just not very sustainable. Luckily the new wave of newsrooms has caught on to the idea of ownership.
MissMagAddict
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I haven’t read this yet, but all I remember seeing was—
The Chiffon Trenches by André Leon Talley is coming in April.
The Chaos at Condé Nast
The memoirs of Dan Peres and other ex-employees of the magazine company reveal mess behind the gloss of the aughts.
By Katherine Rosman
Feb. 12, 2020
Updated 5:57 p.m. ET
It’s a high-class but increasingly common problem: being a former magazine editor in a digitized world that cares little about whose name used to be on top of a defunct masthead. (A masthead, for those unfamiliar with the term, lists in careful hierarchy the top staff of a publication and is most often printed on paper — which tells you pretty much all you need to know.)
At 48, Dan Peres is already an old hand at being a former magazine editor. Condé Nast shut down Details, the men’s glossy that he had been editor of for 15 years, in 2015. Overnight Mr. Peres went from two decades spent as a coveted presence at fashion shows and parties in the world’s capitals to a divorced dad adrift in the ’burbs.
He tried to pivot to digital publications, but quickly learned there is little job security in start-ups. He took on some consulting gigs. He was also jotting down stories from his past life, one not many people knew about.
“I started to have some conversations about next steps career-wise, and during that time I started writing,” Mr. Peres said last week, sitting in his home office in Irvington, N.Y., at a wooden drafting desk that he had lugged from Paris. “There were experiences I wanted to get down on paper. I wanted to keep my mind sharp.”
The result is a memoir, “As Needed for Pain,” which was published this week by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins.
In the book, Mr. Peres reveals an opioid addiction that he tried for years to hide, and which, until he got clean in 2007, had him taking as many as 60 Vicodin pills a day. Among many anecdotes that illustrate his wincing desperation, he tells of gobbling up pills that had fallen onto the floor beneath a urinal at a black-tie event in 2003. “Does the five-second rule count for piss-soaked drugs?” Mr. Peres writes. “I’d like to say I hesitated.”
“You can’t fault his honesty, although you’ve got to wonder about the judgment of his bosses," Jay McInerney wrote in a review for The New York Times. And indeed, “As Needed for Pain” is an eye-opening document of how Mr. Peres for seven years spent his working hours and many of his company’s dollars in pursuit of getting high.
Since 2009, Condé Nast has gone from publishing 22 magazine brands (including one digital-only publication) to 16 magazine brands (six of which are digital only). In 2017, the company had about $120 million in losses.
Mr. Peres’s reign seems to have epitomized the bloated pride before the fall. Founded by Annie Flanders as a scrappy downtown magazine in 1982, Details had gone through several iterations before being taken over by Fairchild, which was ultimately moved under the Condé Nast umbrella. With Mr. Peres as editor, the magazine was retooled as a manual for a metrosexual clinging to a certain frat boy quality, lest you call him gay.
Details had for a time what Tina Brown always used to call “buzz,” with cover models like Robert Downey Jr., Kevin Federline (twice!) and Ben Affleck. It was not so filled with ads that it was a doorstop, like the flagship magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair, but it was still robust.
Freelance journalists wanted to contribute to Details (I was one, reporting a profile of Patrick Kennedy for it in 2001), and the magazine won awards for its design.
Condé Nast, which also then regularly published the magazines Gourmet, Jane, Lucky and Domino, had become famous through shows like HBO’s “Sex and the City.” The company was known for around-the-block Town Cars filled with enigmatic editors who lunched at New York restaurants like the Four Seasons and enjoyed clothing expense accounts and interest-free mortgages provided by their employer.
After being summoned at 28 from Paris where he had worked as a writer and editor for W magazine and given the top job at Details, Mr. Peres lived subsidized for months in the Morgans Hotel. Once, he trashed his room because he couldn’t find his Vicodin; he blamed the housekeeper for stealing his drugs.
The hotel staff “called me Mr. Peres,” he writes. “I liked it. I never once told them to call me Dan.”
Those Were the Days
Editors of glossy magazines had status then because their products seemed important. People went to newsstands or physical mailboxes to find bound pieces of paper dropped by postal workers that would tell them who and what was cool, giving them topics for cocktail-party and water-cooler chatter.
Portable phones were these whiz-bang things that folded shut and were tucked away in pockets and expensive “It” bags.
The early and mid-aughts were the Roaring ’20s of magazines, with the looming economic recession not yet imaginable and the disruption of digital media not considered by publishing executives, so infatuated with their pretty print pages and the huge margins that print advertising delivered. No matter that their one real job was to have their fingers on the pulse of What’s Next.
“Those that are the oracle never think they’re one day not going to be the oracle any longer,” said Ariel Foxman, who helped create Cargo magazine in 2003 for Condé Nast, which closed it in 2006.
Mr. Foxman went on to become editor in chief of InStyle, where he remained until 2016. He is currently trying to sell a memoir called “The Magnificent Dissolve,” which looks at how magazines “led the conversation and then found themselves in the course of a few years chasing the conversation and trying to stay relevant.”
If published, it will join a subgenre of memoirs by onetime Condé Nast editors that includes Ms. Brown’s “The Vanity Fair Diaries”; “Save Me the Plums,” by Ruth Reichl, the former New York Times restaurant critic who went on to become Gourmet’s editor until Condé Nast shuttered it in 2009; and “More Than Enough,” by Elaine Welteroth, late of Teen Vogue.
“What a blast to be a part of something at its peak that now can be seen as a golden age,” said another memoirist, Dana Brown. Mr. Brown was a bartender plucked for an assistant job by the former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.
He rose to be one of Mr. Carter’s deputies and is now writing “Disappearing Ink,” the working title of a memoir about the experience. “It was a time that was pre-technology, it was a time that was magical,” he said. “Writers were called writers, photographers were called photographers. It was before we all became ‘content creators.’”
Kim France was the founding editor of Lucky magazine, which started in 2000 and ceased publishing in 2015. She too is writing a memoir: “This Is Not My Beautiful House,” about moving from Texas to New York and building an outwardly glamorous career while battling substance abuse and depression. (She left Condé Nast in 2010.)
Her mood swings and impetuous behavior were initially treated as a sign of her creative talent, Ms. France said. This was the Condé Nast way.
“It was a privately held company, and they could employ all these really creative, kind of crazy people,” she said. “You had André Leon Talley swanning around. There was drama all over the place. It was obviously bad that this culture existed the way it did, but it started because they valued creativity and the kind of people that were creative.” (As it happens, Mr. Talley also has a memoir set to publish, in April, called “The Chiffon Trenches.”)
It was a culture that somehow allowed Mr. Peres for seven years to live a dual life as an editor in chief responsible for the publication of a national magazine and the management of dozens of employees, and an opioid addict.
When writing the book, Mr. Peres said, it didn’t occur to him that he might be revealing a lack of corporate oversight at Condé Nast or what a white man could get away with doing (and not doing) at a company known for its lavish spending.
“I didn’t overthink it,” he said. “I always set out to write a story about myself and my addiction and how intense of a grip it had on me, and in order to illustrate that, I had to touch on a number of elements of my life, including of course my professional life. I really see Details as a character in the book.”
A spokesman for Condé Nast said, “We’re happy for Dan’s recovery and to know that he’s doing well. Since the time chronicled in Dan’s book, our company and our industry have evolved significantly, and we can’t comment on the way our company was run under prior leadership.”
Mr. Peres tells in his memoir of frequently not making it into the office; when he did, he sneaked occasional naps on his office couch during the heavy drug years. He fell asleep while interviewing a job applicant. He had an assistant plan an unnecessary trip to San Diego, where he rented a car (he doesn’t remember if he or the company paid for it), drove to Tijuana, Mexico, and bought $6,000 worth of drugs to smuggle back across the border and then to New York (in between, he appeared on “Politically Incorrect” with Bill Maher in Los Angeles).
He would find reasons to fly to Los Angeles, to meet a publicist, see his girlfriend, do drugs with a rock star, who is unnamed (“plane highs were usually the best, especially in first class,” Mr. Peres writes). That girlfriend, the actress Sarah Wynter, would become his wife and then ex-wife; they have three school-age sons.
He spent four days “in a plush terry cloth robe” at the Four Seasons in Milan without attending the fashion shows he had traveled there for because he didn’t have sufficient Vicodin to feel like himself. (He then had the front desk send a medico to his room, who wrote him a prescription.)
Mr. Peres conscripted an assistant to unwittingly create with the Condé Nast travel office a 30-day itinerary to Italy and Australia that he could show to doctors as evidence that he needed to fill prescriptions in advance.
On a work trip to Los Angeles, Mr. Peres considered trying heroin and asked his driver to take him to Skid Row, where he was chased by a stranger whom he’d asked for drugs (“It’s not easy to run for your life in a pair of Tod’s driving moccasins,” he writes). He decided buying drugs on the street was not for him.
“I listened to Journey and practically knew the room service menu at the Ritz in Paris by heart,” he writes. “I didn’t know how to do this.”
His Town Car driver in Los Angeles, he writes, became his drug dealer.
‘We Were Running the Show’
When he was present, Mr. Peres could be mercurial, some former colleagues said. “You never knew what kind of day it would be,” said Ece Ozturk, his former assistant, who worked at Details for about six years. “Would it be a good day with the nice Dan or a bad day with the mean Dan? He could be very charming at times, but people were afraid of Dan. People walked on eggshells around him.”
One former employee who had been fired sent a letter to Mary Berner, a publishing executive overseeing the company division that included Details. The letter, which was shared with The Times, cited “Dan Peres’s conspicuously frequent absences” and his “admissions about pill-taking.”
“The atmosphere at this young men’s magazine wasn’t just freewheeling — it was unprofessional,” the fired employee wrote.
Ms. Berner, now the C.E.O. of Cumulus Media, said she had no memory of reading the letter. “I wish I had known” about Mr. Peres’s drug problem, she said, “because I would have tried to help him.”
Mr. Peres writes that his assistant was known to many at Details as “the Rescheduler.” In one seven-week period Ms. Ozturk sent at least five emails to staff canceling meetings, according to emails reviewed by The Times. (“Dan is not in this morning, but may be in this afternoon” … “Dan will be out tomorrow, returning Friday” … “Dan is out today” … “Dan will be away on business tomorrow and Thursday, returning Friday.” Or maybe not: “Dan did not make it back from L.A. so to those who were supposed to have a ‘Vitals’ meeting,” she wrote, referring to a section of the magazine, “it has been canceled.”)
In the absence of a functional editor in chief, the staff of Details worked long hours to put out a magazine. “There were a lot of people there who could pick up the baton,” said Andrew Essex, an advertising executive who served for part of Mr. Peres’s tenure as executive editor.
Over the years, Mr. Peres’s colleagues included Laura Brown, now the editor in chief of InStyle; Jessica Lustig, a deputy editor of The New York Times Magazine; Jeff Gordinier, the food and drinks editor for Esquire; and Andrea Oliveri, a founder of the events company Special Projects.
Even with such support, Details under Mr. Peres had its fair share of mess-ups that these days, under the stern gaze of social media, might have been unsurvivable. In 2007, as Mr. Peres was trying to detox at his mother’s house in Baltimore, Mr. Affleck complained that he was misquoted in a cover story.
There was a party that the magazine was hosting in Mr. Affleck’s honor, and he needed to be placated. Mr. Peres quickly apologized.
Bart Blasengame, who had written the story, conceded that he had played fast and loose with Mr. Affleck’s sentences.
“He said things in fits and starts and I took quotes from different parts of the interview and made them cohesive,” said Mr. Blasengame, who now owns and runs a music club in Portland, Ore.
He said part of the fun of working for Details was the lack of oversight. “We were running the show,” he remembered of himself and his fellow writers. Then, after the publication of the Affleck story, which had been fact-checked and given the OK by Mr. Peres, his contract was terminated (though he went on to receive other assignments from Details). “Admittedly, I didn’t handle it well,” he said, “but it definitely felt like getting thrown under the bus.”
In 2002, the magazine had published an article, “Dudes Who Dish,” that carried the byline of Kurt Andersen, the author well known in media circles as a founder, with Mr. Carter and Thomas L. Phillips Jr., of Spy magazine.
The main problem with the article was that Mr. Andersen didn’t write it. He didn’t even know of its existence until his wife, Anne Kreamer, saw it while leafing through a Details at the gym and asked her husband why he hadn’t told her he was writing for that magazine.
Mr. Peres bragged about landing Mr. Andersen in the pages of Details in his editor’s letter, not having done the very editor in chief thing of reaching out personally to Mr. Andersen to thank him.
“The extra weird wrinkle,” said Mr. Andersen during a phone conversation last week, was that the magazine featured an “interview” of him among the short bios of that month’s contributors. “As well as the terrible piece attributed to me, there was an even worse, horrible, ‘Hey dude, it’s just gossip’ quote from me. It was mortifying. Not just mortifying. Grotesque.”
Mr. Andersen said of the magazine, “It was ahead of its time in terms of fake news fantasy-land alternative truth.”
One of Mr. Peres’s staffers, Bob Ickes, handled the editing of the article. (When contacted this week, Mr. Ickes said he did not write the piece published under Mr. Andersen’s name.)
“Mistakes happen at publications,” Mr. Peres said last week, while acknowledging his yearslong focus on drugs above work and all else. “Surely the magazine would not have been as good as it was if not for my staff. I know anyone who has spent any time around an addict has to spend a lot of time doing a lot of heavy lifting.”
Mr. Essex, the magazine’s former deputy, said it is not fair to portray Mr. Peres as having no involvement with the editorial product known as Details. “He could identify bizarre permutations of male behavior particularly at the epicenter of gay and straight,” Mr. Essex said.
This sort of “male anthropology,” as Mr. Essex called it, did get Mr. Peres in trouble sometimes, like when he assigned to a staffer a 2004 piece titled “Gay or Asian?” that drew protesters to picket outside of the Condé Nast headquarters. “It was a tremendous lapse of judgment,” Mr. Peres said.
But cancel culture was not yet ascendant, and he stayed atop the masthead for another 11 years.
“You know when you’re in dysfunctional family and it’s the only family you know so you think that’s how all families are?” Ms. Ozturk said of working at Details then. “It was like that.”
source | nytimes
The Chiffon Trenches by André Leon Talley is coming in April.
The Chaos at Condé Nast
The memoirs of Dan Peres and other ex-employees of the magazine company reveal mess behind the gloss of the aughts.
By Katherine Rosman
Feb. 12, 2020
Updated 5:57 p.m. ET
It’s a high-class but increasingly common problem: being a former magazine editor in a digitized world that cares little about whose name used to be on top of a defunct masthead. (A masthead, for those unfamiliar with the term, lists in careful hierarchy the top staff of a publication and is most often printed on paper — which tells you pretty much all you need to know.)
At 48, Dan Peres is already an old hand at being a former magazine editor. Condé Nast shut down Details, the men’s glossy that he had been editor of for 15 years, in 2015. Overnight Mr. Peres went from two decades spent as a coveted presence at fashion shows and parties in the world’s capitals to a divorced dad adrift in the ’burbs.
He tried to pivot to digital publications, but quickly learned there is little job security in start-ups. He took on some consulting gigs. He was also jotting down stories from his past life, one not many people knew about.
“I started to have some conversations about next steps career-wise, and during that time I started writing,” Mr. Peres said last week, sitting in his home office in Irvington, N.Y., at a wooden drafting desk that he had lugged from Paris. “There were experiences I wanted to get down on paper. I wanted to keep my mind sharp.”
The result is a memoir, “As Needed for Pain,” which was published this week by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins.
In the book, Mr. Peres reveals an opioid addiction that he tried for years to hide, and which, until he got clean in 2007, had him taking as many as 60 Vicodin pills a day. Among many anecdotes that illustrate his wincing desperation, he tells of gobbling up pills that had fallen onto the floor beneath a urinal at a black-tie event in 2003. “Does the five-second rule count for piss-soaked drugs?” Mr. Peres writes. “I’d like to say I hesitated.”
“You can’t fault his honesty, although you’ve got to wonder about the judgment of his bosses," Jay McInerney wrote in a review for The New York Times. And indeed, “As Needed for Pain” is an eye-opening document of how Mr. Peres for seven years spent his working hours and many of his company’s dollars in pursuit of getting high.
Since 2009, Condé Nast has gone from publishing 22 magazine brands (including one digital-only publication) to 16 magazine brands (six of which are digital only). In 2017, the company had about $120 million in losses.
Mr. Peres’s reign seems to have epitomized the bloated pride before the fall. Founded by Annie Flanders as a scrappy downtown magazine in 1982, Details had gone through several iterations before being taken over by Fairchild, which was ultimately moved under the Condé Nast umbrella. With Mr. Peres as editor, the magazine was retooled as a manual for a metrosexual clinging to a certain frat boy quality, lest you call him gay.
Details had for a time what Tina Brown always used to call “buzz,” with cover models like Robert Downey Jr., Kevin Federline (twice!) and Ben Affleck. It was not so filled with ads that it was a doorstop, like the flagship magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair, but it was still robust.
Freelance journalists wanted to contribute to Details (I was one, reporting a profile of Patrick Kennedy for it in 2001), and the magazine won awards for its design.
Condé Nast, which also then regularly published the magazines Gourmet, Jane, Lucky and Domino, had become famous through shows like HBO’s “Sex and the City.” The company was known for around-the-block Town Cars filled with enigmatic editors who lunched at New York restaurants like the Four Seasons and enjoyed clothing expense accounts and interest-free mortgages provided by their employer.
After being summoned at 28 from Paris where he had worked as a writer and editor for W magazine and given the top job at Details, Mr. Peres lived subsidized for months in the Morgans Hotel. Once, he trashed his room because he couldn’t find his Vicodin; he blamed the housekeeper for stealing his drugs.
The hotel staff “called me Mr. Peres,” he writes. “I liked it. I never once told them to call me Dan.”
Those Were the Days
Editors of glossy magazines had status then because their products seemed important. People went to newsstands or physical mailboxes to find bound pieces of paper dropped by postal workers that would tell them who and what was cool, giving them topics for cocktail-party and water-cooler chatter.
Portable phones were these whiz-bang things that folded shut and were tucked away in pockets and expensive “It” bags.
The early and mid-aughts were the Roaring ’20s of magazines, with the looming economic recession not yet imaginable and the disruption of digital media not considered by publishing executives, so infatuated with their pretty print pages and the huge margins that print advertising delivered. No matter that their one real job was to have their fingers on the pulse of What’s Next.
“Those that are the oracle never think they’re one day not going to be the oracle any longer,” said Ariel Foxman, who helped create Cargo magazine in 2003 for Condé Nast, which closed it in 2006.
Mr. Foxman went on to become editor in chief of InStyle, where he remained until 2016. He is currently trying to sell a memoir called “The Magnificent Dissolve,” which looks at how magazines “led the conversation and then found themselves in the course of a few years chasing the conversation and trying to stay relevant.”
If published, it will join a subgenre of memoirs by onetime Condé Nast editors that includes Ms. Brown’s “The Vanity Fair Diaries”; “Save Me the Plums,” by Ruth Reichl, the former New York Times restaurant critic who went on to become Gourmet’s editor until Condé Nast shuttered it in 2009; and “More Than Enough,” by Elaine Welteroth, late of Teen Vogue.
“What a blast to be a part of something at its peak that now can be seen as a golden age,” said another memoirist, Dana Brown. Mr. Brown was a bartender plucked for an assistant job by the former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.
He rose to be one of Mr. Carter’s deputies and is now writing “Disappearing Ink,” the working title of a memoir about the experience. “It was a time that was pre-technology, it was a time that was magical,” he said. “Writers were called writers, photographers were called photographers. It was before we all became ‘content creators.’”
Kim France was the founding editor of Lucky magazine, which started in 2000 and ceased publishing in 2015. She too is writing a memoir: “This Is Not My Beautiful House,” about moving from Texas to New York and building an outwardly glamorous career while battling substance abuse and depression. (She left Condé Nast in 2010.)
Her mood swings and impetuous behavior were initially treated as a sign of her creative talent, Ms. France said. This was the Condé Nast way.
“It was a privately held company, and they could employ all these really creative, kind of crazy people,” she said. “You had André Leon Talley swanning around. There was drama all over the place. It was obviously bad that this culture existed the way it did, but it started because they valued creativity and the kind of people that were creative.” (As it happens, Mr. Talley also has a memoir set to publish, in April, called “The Chiffon Trenches.”)
It was a culture that somehow allowed Mr. Peres for seven years to live a dual life as an editor in chief responsible for the publication of a national magazine and the management of dozens of employees, and an opioid addict.
When writing the book, Mr. Peres said, it didn’t occur to him that he might be revealing a lack of corporate oversight at Condé Nast or what a white man could get away with doing (and not doing) at a company known for its lavish spending.
“I didn’t overthink it,” he said. “I always set out to write a story about myself and my addiction and how intense of a grip it had on me, and in order to illustrate that, I had to touch on a number of elements of my life, including of course my professional life. I really see Details as a character in the book.”
A spokesman for Condé Nast said, “We’re happy for Dan’s recovery and to know that he’s doing well. Since the time chronicled in Dan’s book, our company and our industry have evolved significantly, and we can’t comment on the way our company was run under prior leadership.”
Mr. Peres tells in his memoir of frequently not making it into the office; when he did, he sneaked occasional naps on his office couch during the heavy drug years. He fell asleep while interviewing a job applicant. He had an assistant plan an unnecessary trip to San Diego, where he rented a car (he doesn’t remember if he or the company paid for it), drove to Tijuana, Mexico, and bought $6,000 worth of drugs to smuggle back across the border and then to New York (in between, he appeared on “Politically Incorrect” with Bill Maher in Los Angeles).
He would find reasons to fly to Los Angeles, to meet a publicist, see his girlfriend, do drugs with a rock star, who is unnamed (“plane highs were usually the best, especially in first class,” Mr. Peres writes). That girlfriend, the actress Sarah Wynter, would become his wife and then ex-wife; they have three school-age sons.
He spent four days “in a plush terry cloth robe” at the Four Seasons in Milan without attending the fashion shows he had traveled there for because he didn’t have sufficient Vicodin to feel like himself. (He then had the front desk send a medico to his room, who wrote him a prescription.)
Mr. Peres conscripted an assistant to unwittingly create with the Condé Nast travel office a 30-day itinerary to Italy and Australia that he could show to doctors as evidence that he needed to fill prescriptions in advance.
On a work trip to Los Angeles, Mr. Peres considered trying heroin and asked his driver to take him to Skid Row, where he was chased by a stranger whom he’d asked for drugs (“It’s not easy to run for your life in a pair of Tod’s driving moccasins,” he writes). He decided buying drugs on the street was not for him.
“I listened to Journey and practically knew the room service menu at the Ritz in Paris by heart,” he writes. “I didn’t know how to do this.”
His Town Car driver in Los Angeles, he writes, became his drug dealer.
‘We Were Running the Show’
When he was present, Mr. Peres could be mercurial, some former colleagues said. “You never knew what kind of day it would be,” said Ece Ozturk, his former assistant, who worked at Details for about six years. “Would it be a good day with the nice Dan or a bad day with the mean Dan? He could be very charming at times, but people were afraid of Dan. People walked on eggshells around him.”
One former employee who had been fired sent a letter to Mary Berner, a publishing executive overseeing the company division that included Details. The letter, which was shared with The Times, cited “Dan Peres’s conspicuously frequent absences” and his “admissions about pill-taking.”
“The atmosphere at this young men’s magazine wasn’t just freewheeling — it was unprofessional,” the fired employee wrote.
Ms. Berner, now the C.E.O. of Cumulus Media, said she had no memory of reading the letter. “I wish I had known” about Mr. Peres’s drug problem, she said, “because I would have tried to help him.”
Mr. Peres writes that his assistant was known to many at Details as “the Rescheduler.” In one seven-week period Ms. Ozturk sent at least five emails to staff canceling meetings, according to emails reviewed by The Times. (“Dan is not in this morning, but may be in this afternoon” … “Dan will be out tomorrow, returning Friday” … “Dan is out today” … “Dan will be away on business tomorrow and Thursday, returning Friday.” Or maybe not: “Dan did not make it back from L.A. so to those who were supposed to have a ‘Vitals’ meeting,” she wrote, referring to a section of the magazine, “it has been canceled.”)
In the absence of a functional editor in chief, the staff of Details worked long hours to put out a magazine. “There were a lot of people there who could pick up the baton,” said Andrew Essex, an advertising executive who served for part of Mr. Peres’s tenure as executive editor.
Over the years, Mr. Peres’s colleagues included Laura Brown, now the editor in chief of InStyle; Jessica Lustig, a deputy editor of The New York Times Magazine; Jeff Gordinier, the food and drinks editor for Esquire; and Andrea Oliveri, a founder of the events company Special Projects.
Even with such support, Details under Mr. Peres had its fair share of mess-ups that these days, under the stern gaze of social media, might have been unsurvivable. In 2007, as Mr. Peres was trying to detox at his mother’s house in Baltimore, Mr. Affleck complained that he was misquoted in a cover story.
There was a party that the magazine was hosting in Mr. Affleck’s honor, and he needed to be placated. Mr. Peres quickly apologized.
Bart Blasengame, who had written the story, conceded that he had played fast and loose with Mr. Affleck’s sentences.
“He said things in fits and starts and I took quotes from different parts of the interview and made them cohesive,” said Mr. Blasengame, who now owns and runs a music club in Portland, Ore.
He said part of the fun of working for Details was the lack of oversight. “We were running the show,” he remembered of himself and his fellow writers. Then, after the publication of the Affleck story, which had been fact-checked and given the OK by Mr. Peres, his contract was terminated (though he went on to receive other assignments from Details). “Admittedly, I didn’t handle it well,” he said, “but it definitely felt like getting thrown under the bus.”
In 2002, the magazine had published an article, “Dudes Who Dish,” that carried the byline of Kurt Andersen, the author well known in media circles as a founder, with Mr. Carter and Thomas L. Phillips Jr., of Spy magazine.
The main problem with the article was that Mr. Andersen didn’t write it. He didn’t even know of its existence until his wife, Anne Kreamer, saw it while leafing through a Details at the gym and asked her husband why he hadn’t told her he was writing for that magazine.
Mr. Peres bragged about landing Mr. Andersen in the pages of Details in his editor’s letter, not having done the very editor in chief thing of reaching out personally to Mr. Andersen to thank him.
“The extra weird wrinkle,” said Mr. Andersen during a phone conversation last week, was that the magazine featured an “interview” of him among the short bios of that month’s contributors. “As well as the terrible piece attributed to me, there was an even worse, horrible, ‘Hey dude, it’s just gossip’ quote from me. It was mortifying. Not just mortifying. Grotesque.”
Mr. Andersen said of the magazine, “It was ahead of its time in terms of fake news fantasy-land alternative truth.”
One of Mr. Peres’s staffers, Bob Ickes, handled the editing of the article. (When contacted this week, Mr. Ickes said he did not write the piece published under Mr. Andersen’s name.)
“Mistakes happen at publications,” Mr. Peres said last week, while acknowledging his yearslong focus on drugs above work and all else. “Surely the magazine would not have been as good as it was if not for my staff. I know anyone who has spent any time around an addict has to spend a lot of time doing a lot of heavy lifting.”
Mr. Essex, the magazine’s former deputy, said it is not fair to portray Mr. Peres as having no involvement with the editorial product known as Details. “He could identify bizarre permutations of male behavior particularly at the epicenter of gay and straight,” Mr. Essex said.
This sort of “male anthropology,” as Mr. Essex called it, did get Mr. Peres in trouble sometimes, like when he assigned to a staffer a 2004 piece titled “Gay or Asian?” that drew protesters to picket outside of the Condé Nast headquarters. “It was a tremendous lapse of judgment,” Mr. Peres said.
But cancel culture was not yet ascendant, and he stayed atop the masthead for another 11 years.
“You know when you’re in dysfunctional family and it’s the only family you know so you think that’s how all families are?” Ms. Ozturk said of working at Details then. “It was like that.”
source | nytimes
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Condé Nast Entertainment Shifting to Publication-Based Studio Structure for TV, Film Projects
Condé Nast Entertainment is upping its TV and film ambitions, announcing the formation of multiple “studios” dedicated to its major publishing brands.
The New York-based media and publishing company is launching studios initially for five magazine titles: The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Wired and GQ. With the move, CNE plans to hire a studio head at each title who will work alongside the editorial teams — with the goal of better identifying and developing projects for film, TV and podcasts.
Condé Nast Entertainment president Oren Katzeff will collaborate with the editors-in-chief of the respective mags to recruit studio heads, who will in turn work with CNE’s existing L.A.-based film and TV team including SVP of motion pictures Geneva Wasserman and SVP of scripted programming Jon Koa.
Whalerock and WME advised CNE on the framework for the brand studios and both “will continue to work collaboratively with the brands on the execution,” Condé Nast said.
Along with the new studios structure, CNE announced new projects and updates for its TV and film slate, including the theatrical release date of the renamed film “City of a Million Soldiers” (formerly called “Mosul”) based on a New Yorker piece; a film based on a Wired article being developed with Sam Esmail’s Esmail Corp.; and “The Chairmen,” a film based on a Vanity Fair article about the true story of rival antique dealers in Paris.
source | variety
Condé Nast Entertainment is upping its TV and film ambitions, announcing the formation of multiple “studios” dedicated to its major publishing brands.
The New York-based media and publishing company is launching studios initially for five magazine titles: The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Wired and GQ. With the move, CNE plans to hire a studio head at each title who will work alongside the editorial teams — with the goal of better identifying and developing projects for film, TV and podcasts.
Condé Nast Entertainment president Oren Katzeff will collaborate with the editors-in-chief of the respective mags to recruit studio heads, who will in turn work with CNE’s existing L.A.-based film and TV team including SVP of motion pictures Geneva Wasserman and SVP of scripted programming Jon Koa.
Whalerock and WME advised CNE on the framework for the brand studios and both “will continue to work collaboratively with the brands on the execution,” Condé Nast said.
Along with the new studios structure, CNE announced new projects and updates for its TV and film slate, including the theatrical release date of the renamed film “City of a Million Soldiers” (formerly called “Mosul”) based on a New Yorker piece; a film based on a Wired article being developed with Sam Esmail’s Esmail Corp.; and “The Chairmen,” a film based on a Vanity Fair article about the true story of rival antique dealers in Paris.
source | variety
