The Business of Magazines

[iluvjeisa]

^Could you explain how this fits into the topic?

 

[tigerrouge]

The reaper arrives at GQ and Vanity Fair (nymag.com

Conde Nast Layoffs Reach GQ, Vanity Fair

10/22/09

In the past few weeks, the McKinsey-ordered cutbacks at remaining Condé Nast magazines seemed to have focused mostly on the business side. This week, the company honed in on editorial.

Monday was layoff day at Glamour, Wired, Lucky, and Style.com. Tuesday, the black cloud came to Bon Appétit and Details; Wednesday, Architectural Digest reportedly lost several staffers and, we hear, Allure lost executive editor Susan Kittenplan, a one-time Vanity Fair editor who has been with the company approximately forever.

Today was GQ's day of reckoning.

At the men's magazine, four editorial staffers from around the middle of the masthead were axed, says our source, who adds that Vanity Fair's editorial side may have also seen a reduction in editorial today.

Why are they dragging things out all slow and painful-like? "The whole lameness of this is that they're letting human resources drive the schedule," a still-employed-but-shaken source tells us. "And they said they couldn't handle laying off everybody all at once. So every magazine has a scheduled day."

At least tomorrow will probably be quieter. "Condé legend has it that once they laid off a guy on a Friday and he went home over the weekend and killed himself," says our source. "So they never lay people off on Fridays anymore."

Well, that's comforting. We guess?

*UPDATE FRIDAY The Post's Keith Kelly reports that Vanity Fair did indeed have "double-digit" layoffs, which "hit as high as senior editors and as low as fact checkers." He added the editor Graydon Carter "didn't deliver the bad news himself"—he's rumored to be on vacation in Bermuda.

Women's Wear Daily reports that Heather Halberstadt, a senior editor who had been at the title for about 10 years, was one of the people let go.

 

[tigerrouge]

And another look at those Vanity Fair lay-offs (nypost.com

Carter's chutzpah - Vanity Fair boss gets sun as staff gets burned

October 24, 2009

As another wave of job cuts hit Condé Nast yesterday -- this time at the Fairchild division -- Vanity Fair Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter was being blasted by his colleagues for jetting off to Bermuda as members of his staff were given pink slips.

"I think it is extraordinary that he let this happen," said one Condé Nast insider of Carter's vacation. "It says he is not a leader. That he is not in the trenches, that he is profoundly out of touch."

While The Post yesterday reported that Carter began a vacation on the day the layoffs were made, it turns out Carter traveled to Bermuda, where temperatures are hovering in the high 70s, while as many as 20 people on the Vanity Fair staff were losing their jobs.

The night before, Carter was seen at his Midtown restaurant The Monkey Bar, and earlier this week he was hosting a book party for New York Times reporter and author Andrew Ross Sorkin.

The layoffs were the result of an order from Chairman S.I. Newhouse and CEO Charles Townsend that Vanity Fair reduce costs by 27 percent -- slightly more than the 25 percent cuts that other magazines were ordered to make.

The outraged insider noted that Carter struggled with having to make the cuts. "He has had a particular problem implementing these cuts," the insider said. "He has people on the payroll whose only job is to tend to Graydon. But he doesn't want to cut any members of [his] court."

However, another insider gave Carter a pass for being out of town when the pink slips were handed out. "Graydon looks bad, but it's not really his call," said this person. "How the cuts are made is the work of the [human resources] department and they have been terribly inefficient throughout, and that's why these things occur."

Meanwhile, in what is expected to be one of the last round of staff reductions at the glitzy publisher, sources said an estimated 15 people lost their jobs yesterday at Fairchild, the division run by Richard "Mad Dog" Beckman.

Fairchild publications include Women's Wear Daily and Footwear News, among other titles.

The cuts, which represent about 5 percent of the 300-person Fairchild workforce, are said to be equally split between the business and editorial sides.

Among those who lost their jobs was WWD Associate Publisher Paula Fortgang, one of three highly paid Condé executives Beckman brought with him to Fairchild when he was reassigned to the division earlier this year. The trio of females were known internally as "Charlie's Angels."

Beckman, who's known for being temperamental, stayed in town while his staffers got the bad news before leaving for a weekend trip to London to visit his elderly father.

Over the past three weeks, Condé has been slashing jobs at its various magazines following a review by management-consultant firm McKinsey & Co. that led to the shutdown of four magazines.

The layoffs at Vanity Fair came after Newhouse had a sit-down with both Carter and Vogue Editrix Anna Wintour last week, according to one insider. While it could not be learned what was on the agenda, the source said Newhouse rarely meets with Carter and Wintour at the same time.

 

[homeboy]

Scary times for the publishing industry, especially when industry leaders such as Conde Nast haven't survived the recession without dented financials.

 

[tarsha]

According to one of the Turkish newspaper, Vogue Turkey's first issue will be March 2010.

 

[MissMagAddict]

source | wwd.com

W magazine will introduce two themed issues in 2010, beginning in April, when the entire book will be devoted to shopping. During a breakfast with beauty advertisers and executives on Wednesday, vice president and publisher Nina Lawrence explained the issue will be 100 percent “shop-able,” which means every item shown in editorial and advertising is for sale. Readers will be able to shop directly from ads, for example, by taking a picture of a given page and sending it to an e-mail address. Up to three messages will then be returned to the sender, including a link to buy, a special offer and a video of that brand’s latest collection. To mark the issue, Lawrence is planning a two-day shopping event in New York’s Meatpacking District at the end of March.

W also intends to publish a “society issue” in December 2010 that is slated to include an exploration of American society over four decades; black books of New York, Los Angeles and Washington socials; a selected network of socials blogging and plenty of photographs. A spokeswoman pointed out that W will not reduce its frequency next year, contrary to rumors, adding that the beauty-themed issue will be back next year, in May.

During the breakfast, Lawrence also discussed a new beauty report from W that looks at the concerns of today’s luxury consumer. The report found that 73 percent have maintained their spend on beauty products and 86 percent view beauty products as affordable luxuries. And while 93 percent of respondents said they are not brand loyal, the study found 96 percent will shop a given brand’s entire line if they find a product they like.

 

[dju dju]

Vogue Turkey

i've heard that Vogue Turkey will be launched in March 2010. is that true and does anyone have more information related to it?
thanks in advance!

 

[Miss Dalloway]

Oh lord, the last thing we need is a society issue every year from W, are they seriously thinking that is breaking ground?

 

[j'adorekapusta]

Oh lord, the last thing we need is a society issue every year from W, are they seriously thinking that is breaking ground?

wasn't it Vogue Turkey? just kidding
i've just been wondering how unbelievable it was to imagine Rihanna getting a Vogue Italia edit by no-one but Steven Klein back then when she started her career. and now look... the kid is on the block.
then you have Daphne Guinness who has this very niche, almost exclusive appearance (why bother with Elle and Glamour when you can get, yet again, VI?). of course these are the very reasonable 'pros' for 'society' to get into fashion titles (if she can, do i have less money?). the more exposure, the better. and wouldn't it be wonderful to fancy your very own cover of W sitting on top of the world in one of Mr.Trump's towers? this kind of makes sense, no?

 

[MissMagAddict]

Magazine Publishers of America via magculture.

 

[tigerrouge]

Another change at W (nypost.com

Where's W?

Here's something at Condé Nast that has nothing to do with carnage -- at least, we don't think it does.

W magazine, the glossy fashion magazine that has experienced a more than 40 percent drop in ad pages this year, will be shifted back under the Fairchild Fashion Group.

Richard Beckman, who was made CEO of Fairchild earlier this year as the Condé Nast Media Group he headed was rapidly being downsized, will get a little bit of an expansion.

"These businesses belong together," said Beckman, who now has a glossy under his control to augment the grittier rag trade newspapers with somewhat less glamorous advertisers.

W Publisher Nina Lawrence has a new boss -- Beckman -- instead of reporting directly to Condé CEO Charles Townsend.

W was moved into the main Condé Nast unit when Mary Berner, now CEO of the Chapter 11-saddled Reader's Digest Association, was chased from Fairchild in 2004.
The magazine stayed in the Fairchild building on Third Avenue.

The recent Condé Nast cuts affected W, which lost one editorial staffer and four on the business side, and Fairchild, where Beckman last Friday knocked about 5 percent of the 300-person workforce from Women's Wear Daily and its smaller trade siblings.

 

[tigerrouge]

An interview with Graydon Carter from last week's Observer Woman supplement (observer.co.uk

Graydon Carter: Literati? Glitterati? I'd rather have a quiet night in with the missus…

With his super-exclusive New York restaurants and his famously star-spangled Oscar-night parties, is Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter the world's most powerful editor? Absolutely not, he tells Polly Vernon (who then asks him for a job).

If Anna Wintour – editor-in-chief of US Vogue, star of The September Issue – is the most famous magazine editor in the world, Graydon Carter – editor of Vanity Fair, celebrity restaurateur, reluctant man about town – runs a very close second.

Never mind that Carter insists barely anyone knows him; that if he stands outside a hotel entrance for long enough someone will inevitably give him their car keys. "Something about my comportment says 'valet parker'." Never mind that he has never done – and he swears he'll never do – a September Issue. "I'm not a big one for being on TV," he says. "I think it works for Anna, but…" (He tails off, a little appalled.)

Wintour and Carter are super-editors. They've both run their very famous titles for a very long time: Wintour's been at Vogue for 20 years; Carter at Vanity Fair for 17. They've both had not-entirely-generous bestselling books written around them. Wintour was thinly veiled in fiction for Lauren Weisberger's The Devil Wears Prada; Carter was not remotely veiled in fiction for Toby Young's How to Lose Friends & Alienate People. And they both have signature hairstyles. Wintour's is helmet-rigid bob; Carter's is an upward soaring swoosh of baby-soft grey – a 'do he says he washed with washing-up liquid until relatively recently.

They are at the very top of the magazine food chain. The head boy and girl of the whole shebang. So when Graydon Carter emailed me, unbidden(ish) and out of the blue, I was shocked and awed.

Two and a half years ago, I wrote a small piece for Observer Food Monthly whingeing about not being able to get a table at the Waverly Inn, Carter's very hot New York restaurant, which is located two doors down from his family home in the West Village. I'd been in the city for work, stumbled on the restaurant, stuck my head round the door and asked if I could stay for dinner. Unsurprisingly, I'd been told that I had to call ahead and book. The article ran; the following day I received an email, direct from Carter's in-box. It read: "Dear Polly, Any time you want to eat at the Waverly Inn, please call my assistant Jon. Cheers, Graydon."

It was a bit like being emailed by God. I responded with an interview request. He said he was interested. There was some to-ing and fro-ing. Then: bam! – OK, maybe not bam exactly, but two and a half years on – I find myself jetlagged, nervy and wearing my very best clothes, in the lobby of 4 Times Square, HQ of Condé Nast.

The ceilings are extremely high, the models are alien-lovely and hopping about on one leg, changing from street-pounding flat shoes into high heels in advance of go-see appointments with Condé Nast's fashion editors. I'm ushered into a special lift, and whisked up 22 floors to the offices of Vanity Fair. I emerge into a posh corridor, which gives on to a posh suite of offices – which are firmly security locked. I push at the locked door ineffectually. I can actually see the peak of Carter's collapsed quiff from where I stand.

Vanity Fair is a big fat magazine deal. It's got a preposterously grand heritage. The magazine launched the entire Condé Nast empire in 1913; by 1919 it was doing storming business documenting the cultural moment. It counts Dorothy Parker among early staff members. In 1992, when editor Tina Brown left for the New Yorker, Graydon Carter took over. Despite claiming he expected to be fired within issues, Carter has remained at the helm of the magazine ever since. Under him Vanity Fair has outed the Deep Throat source on Watergate; published an exposé of the tobacco industry that became the basis for the film The Insider; and embraced the glossy celebrity moment with unexpected passion. It's put its name to an annual Oscar after-party that is now the hottest ticket in town by some distance and that inspires acts of incredible desperation on behalf of those anxious to get into it. "The lengths! The desperate lengths!" Carter will tell me. "Oh, you have no idea! So tragic, sometimes! We keep a file of the worst…" Its annual Hollywood issue – a phone-book-thick volume published to coincide with the Oscar do which traditionally carries a "gatefold cover", a triple-length fold-out portrait of the most desirable and inaccessible A-list group imaginable – is one of the reasons, Carter says, why his Vanity Fair is now a profitable magazine. It sells an average of 1,100,000 copies a month. Not bad going, I say, when I finally make it through the security-locked doors (I am buzzed in by a fresh-faced assistant, who may or may not be Jon) and into Carter's large corner office (views over the neon-spangled expanse of Times Square, huge glossy picture of his four grown-up children on one wall, snap of his new baby daughter Isabella Rose in a freestanding frame on his tidy desk).

Give or take his hairstyle, which is exactly as it seems in society-page pap shots and in satirical cartoons (a bit odd – though not nearly as odd as that of his on/off nemesis Donald Trump), Carter isn't what I expect at all. He isn't suave or sound-bitey, all well-rehearsed bon mots and charmless charm. He isn't pompous. Nor is he a male Anna Wintour, as she seems in The September Issue: scary, taciturn, scathing. He's 60 years old and a bit bumbling. Mild mannered. Good and wry. Bright, clearly; although happily (given that he's only agreed to meet me to promote a collection of Vanity Fair mini-interviews entitled The Proust Questionnaire) he doesn't showboat his intellect. Physically he's big and cumbersome, aware of his own paunch. He says he has to try "extra hard" with women in general, and his younger (third) wife (Anna Scott) in particular, on account of it. "I'm losing my hair. I'm overweight. It's not like that's at the top of the list when women go looking for a man. It's like – complete collapse, every year." He laughs mournfully.

Spend in excess of five minutes in Graydon Carter's company, and you'll hear plenty more in that vein. Humility-despite-it-all is Carter's shtick. He bombards any listener with self-deprecating statements, with anecdotes designed to expose what he sells as his myriad flaws. He is the punch line to all his own jokes. So I ask him if the Oscar parties are fun, if they can possibly be worth the incredible feats of blagging undertaken to gain access, and he says: "They're fun if you're a guest, I expect. Me? I'm a glorified maître d'. I don't really serve any function other than to keep an eye on the waiters. Make sure people's drinks are topped up."

He says he's so incredibly shy that he has to nibble a beta blocker before any major public event or plane ride. I ask him what it feels like to wield such influence over the New York cultural scene, with his magazine and his two restaurants and his potential to make or break the career of anyone aspiring to do anything vaguely creative, and he says: "I do OK." I ask him if he thinks he's a powerful man, and he says: "I don't think so. No."

Only – of course, he is powerful. He's even something of a political player. He waged war against George W Bush's administration from the pages of Vanity Fair, and from a dedicated book, published in 2004 and entitled What We've Lost: How the Bush Administration Has Curtailed Our Freedoms, Mortgaged Our Economy, Ravaged Our Environment and Damaged Our Standing in the World. He casually references his close friendship with New York mayor Mike Bloomberg during our interview. This makes the relentless self-deprecation a little disingenuous.

 

[tigerrouge]

The interview continued... (same source

Edward Graydon Carter was born in 1949, in a middle-class suburb of Ottawa. "If you grow up in Canada, you've got your nose up against a window of a much bigger, more fun party happening here, in the United States. Happening in New York." He wasn't propelled onward by raging ambition; as a young man Carter had vague fantasies of "being a playwright or a painter". He always loved magazines: "I thought magazines told you more about the culture and society – and I don't mean 'society, fancy-dress-party society'; I mean society – than newspapers or books."

He was certain, however, that he needed to leave Canada and get to New York at the earliest opportunity. "I thought: if I can just… get there… I didn't have any plans, I never had any career… map, or anything. But I thought I would not be happy if I didn't give New York a shot." He got somewhat waylaid en route. He pursued some curious choices. He worked as a grave digger and as a lineman on a Canadian railway, he lied to co-workers about being Jewish because he thought it made him sound more interesting, and he was briefly married to a French Canadian museum worker.

He finally made it to New York in 1977, aged 28. He didn't know anyone, he didn't have any money: "And it was difficult but so exhilarating. I really, really loved New York when I first got here." He landed a job as a trainee writer at Time magazine; while he was there he met writer Kurt Anderson. In 1986 the two men founded Spy together, a satirical publication in the Private Eye mould. It ran on a shoe-string budget, powered mainly by the force of Carter and Anderson's passion for lampooning haute New York society. "I had a ball. Two editors and 25 interns… We didn't pay ourselves anything, but we had barter arrangements all over New York. I had a deal every single night! Restaurants would advertise in the magazine in return for food. We had a barter arrangement with a limousine firm… and with a dental firm! The whole Spy staff got free dental care. I still go there! I wish we could have the barter system here at Vanity Fair. But I think we have regulations that stop us…"

Carter loves talking about Spy. He and Anderson sold it nearly 20 years ago, when Carter was 41, but he mentions it constantly. He's attached to the anarchy and mischief of the old title, I suspect; he proudly tells me that he still gets snubbed at cocktail parties by obscure elements of old New York society because of feuds that played out in the magazine. "And we have knocks with Donald Trump [perennial Spy target, "the short-fingered vulgarian", as they called him] but it's not like he and I cross paths a lot." (It should perhaps be pointed out that Carter attended Trump's last wedding – although to be fair he did say afterwards: "I have no idea why I was invited. He tried to sue me a year or two before.")

Does he miss Spy? Does he feel he has sold out in taking on a magazine like Vanity Fair, which celebrates glossy-haired, gleaming-toothed fame with each and every cover? He says he doesn't. "You need to be young and slightly angry to do a magazine like Spy," he says. "You need to be willing to burn all your bridges. And I would say that if you're still angry in your 50s, then you don't need a magazine; you need help."

He left Spy in 1991, and spent a year reinventing the New York Observer. And then Si Newhouse approached him about Vanity Fair.

Is it a perfect magazine now, 17 years into his tenure? He seems to think it's close. "You sort of design a perfect issue and it always comes within – meh, 10 and 20% of what you had in mind." What's the secret? "I don't do any research. It's all about gut. Editing – it's always about gut."

The fact is Vanity Fair is, if not a perfect magazine, then certainly a jolly good one. It's an eccentric old mix of subject matter and writing styles, voices and messages and images, all of which somehow sit next to each other in a way that isn't comfortable exactly, but is certainly a bit thrilling. The last issue had a first-person interview with Levi Johnston, father of Bristol Palin's baby, which recounts his experiences of Sarah Palin's campaign. It's a clumsy, voyeuristic and deliberately stilted read – and absolutely brilliant. The current issue has a Michael Wolfe article on Rupert Murdoch's plans to charge for his newspapers' online content, a lengthy piece recalling the horror of the 2008 siege at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai, and an interview with cover star Penélope Cruz.

The celebrity covers are a necessary evil, Carter concedes. "We have to sell up to 700,000 copies off the newsstand… Good-looking people sell better than less good-looking people." He is, I think, secretly proud that the Vanity Fair cover lines tend toward the awkward. They're clunky and cumbersome, very straight (What We Can Learn From Norman Rockwell; The Week Goldman Sachs Almost Died… etc); they jar with the celeb cover images, which are all high gloss and obvious glamour. Carter says he wishes he were better at cover lines. But I think he actually prefers them as they stand, because they detract from the slickness and hard sell of the photographs.

Carter talks adoringly about his magazine. About how certain writers take an entire month to craft the perfect column; about others who are dispatched to the far corners of the globe to get the interviews necessary to complete 10,000-word essays concerning things of enormous importance. About the Annie Leibovitz shoots and Christopher Hitchens polemics. I guess at the budgets required to maintain an operation like this, at Leibovitz's day rate and Hitchens's word rate, and feel a little faint. I bristle slightly at the snobbish elitism of it. The kind of rigour, dedicated time and attention to detail that Carter is so proud of is dependent on access to a lot of money. Yet I am still glad that a title like Vanity Fair continues to thrive. Its success is contrary to received wisdom on the inevitable demise of print journalism, and the supremacy of internet content.

And then Graydon Carter goes and tells me he's only in it for the money.

"That's all I work for!"

But, I say – aren't you really rich?

"No! No! No!"

You must be! (I've heard rumours of a $2m salary, of a mortgage covered by Condé Nast.)

"No no no no no! I'm not rich at all! I have five kids; educating kids in New York means you have to bring in extra money. I have a nice life , I enjoy doing what I do, but if someone gave me a hundred million dollars – I would clear out my office."

So you have enormous passion for the magazine – up until a point?

"Yup. Up until the hundred-million-dollars point. Some uncle dies and leaves me the money and… But it's not going to happen." Given which, he says he won't leave; not as long as "they" let him stick around. He thinks they probably will.

 

[tigerrouge]

And the last part (same source

Graydon Carter insists that he is no kind of bon vivant, that he's almost always home by 5.30pm to be with his wife Anna Scott and their baby, Isabella Rose. (Carter amicably divorced former paralegal Cynthia Williamson, his wife of 18 years and the mother of his four grown children, in 2000; he married Scott in 2005. The couple had Isabella Rose last year). He says that he's "hugely domesticated". He thinks people have misunderstood that about him, because of the Waverly Inn (which he launched in 2007) and his new uptown restaurant venture, the equally inaccessible Monkey Bar. He does the seating plan for both, every night. "And what surprises me is that the people uptown [in Monkey Bar] are much more concerned with the trappings of the food chain and where they will sit, than the people downtown [in the Waverly]. They don't drink as much, they're not as interested in having a good time, they're more health-conscious…" Which is bad? "Yes!"

Has he ever barred anyone?

"Erm… There are people I've had to talk to. I've said: 'You cannot be rude to the staff! I won't put up with that'."

Because you're a protective boss?

"Yes," he says. "But… I find it offensive to me, if they're rude to the staff." Which is the first – and last – glimpse I am allowed of Carter's ego.

I ask him how one might best navigate fancy New York publishing circles. What's the secret?

"People think it's the most complicated thing in the world. And – it's the easiest thing. There's only one rule, and it's the easiest rule…"

Carter is playing the moment for drama.

"It's just…"

Yes? Yes?

"Be nice."

Really?

"You have no idea. Just be nice. Things will happen. People think they have to be ambitious. But at a certain age, all you want is to be around nice, decent people. Oh, nice is a cheap word, maybe not quite the right word… Kindness! Generosity! Be that way, you'll do well in New York."

Before I leave, I ask him a somewhat inevitable question.

Graydon – what do I have to do for a job?

He laughs, nervously. I wait it out.

Eventually: "Well," he says, "we're not hiring right now, unfortunately… it's going to be a year." (Condé Nast has had to make significant reductions in head count recently. It folded four of its magazines, including the foodie title Gourmet, a day before I arrived in New York.)

OK. I say. Can I send my CV in, in a year?

"Sure! Yeah. Yup…" he says, unconvincingly. Then: "And um – I love your name. You have a great name for a journalist. A great name."

Oh dear, I think. If that's the best Graydon Carter thinks I have going for me…

"Yup. It's a great name," he goes on. "There are very few names that are better for a journalist. One of my best writers is Wayne Langewiesche, an extraordinary journalist – but 99% of our readers don't know how to pronounce his name. And you can't get it on a cover… But 'Polly Vernon' – I think women would like it, and men would think: 'I'd like to meet that girl.'" I cheer up.

He warms to his subject: "I can see you having your own show! The Polly Vernon Show!" he says.

I leave Carter's office, take the lift back down from the 22nd floor of the Condé Nast building, walk out of the lobby and into Times Square; and I am thinking all the while that that is the nicest knock-back I've had in years.

Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire: 100 Luminaries Ponder Love, Death, Happiness and the Meaning of Life edited by Graydon Carter will be available on amazon.co.uk from November

 

[Dieselmax]

According to this communiqué issued by Condé Nast, the June/July, August, September and October 2009 issues of Vogue Paris were the Best Selling Issues Ever


nmpp.fr

 

[tarsha]

+28 % & Kate Moss

Thanks for posting.

 

[iluvjeisa]

^Great news, though I see a slight decline in quality this year. IMO, obviously.

 

[kimair]

The magazine Metropolitan Home will be closing, Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. announced today.

Hachette will focus resources — and, presumably, try to concentrate ad pages — at Elle Décor, which it also owns. The company had shut down another design title, Home, in 2008.

Metropolitan Home’s December issue will be its last, and editor Donna Warner and her staff will leave the company. It joins other titles that have shut down as the housing market has suffered, including InStyle Home, Cottage Living, Blueprint, Country Home, O at Home and Domino.

nytimes / november 9, 2009

 

[tigerrouge]

Sad news, although Elle Decor doesn't ever really seem to have that much substance (or style), so it's not as if I'll be swapping my interest over to it; I often get swayed by the cover shot into picking it up, but the actual feature section seems so small.

And it's certainly not on the level of Architectural Digest or Veranda, in terms of amount of content or lovely photography.

 

[Pedro]

Source: thedailybeast.com

The Magazine Whisperer
by Jacob Bernstein

Fabien Baron has redesigned some of the most famous publications in the world, including Harper’s Bazaar and French Vogue. He talks to Jacob Bernstein about reinventing Andy Warhol’s Interview and doing a new book with Madonna.

Fabien Baron’s office on New York's Hudson Street is the cleanest thing you’ve ever seen. There’s a flat-screen TV on the wall in the waiting room and a couple of loveseats to sit on, but everything is white. The walls are white. The seats are white. The coffee table is white. It’s almost like a doctor’s office, except that the man who works here with his staff of 35 doesn’t diagnose illnesses: He cures design problems.

For nearly 20 years, Baron has been among the most successful art directors in fashion, presiding over ad campaigns for Calvin Klein, Burberry, and Giorgio Armani, as well as overseeing the looks of four of the most famous fashion magazines in the world. In the 1980s, Baron and Franca Sozzani turned Italian Vogue into a laboratory for edgy, experimental photography. In the ’90s, he took over Harper’s Bazaar with Liz Tilberis and helped usher in the minimalistic aesthetic that came to dominate fashion. Then, in 2003, Carine Roitfeld brought Baron aboard to redesign French Vogue and it became (despite its small readership) perhaps the most influential fashion publication in the world. And in 2008, when Ingrid Sischy and Sandy Brant sold their stakes in Interview to Brant’s ex-husband, Peter, it was Baron who once again got the call to reinvent Andy Warhol’s magazine.

Baron’s Interview is a product that looks and feels less like a magazine than a coffee table book, which is exactly what the designer, 50, was going for. “You have to offer something that feels produced, because that’s what you cannot have on Internet,” Baron says in his trademark patois, dropping the “the” before Internet. “You have to reinforce all the good things magazines are there for and eliminate everything else.” Consequently, he’s upped the trim size of the magazine (it is now comparable to V and W), cleaned up the design, and filled Interview with pages and pages of impeccably styled fashion photographs (and very expensive clothes).

Still, for an art director whose design aesthetic is pristine, his early months at the magazine were rather messy. Shortly after he was hired, Baron (and the magazine’s fashion director, Karl Templer) quit after clashing with Interview’s co-editorial director Glenn O’Brien. Soon after that, O’Brien left and Baron was brought back.

Certainly the most recent issue, a 40th-anniversary special with Kristen Stewart on the cover, doesn’t indicate a magazine in turmoil. It carried almost 100 pages of ads and virtually every top-tier fashion brand signed on, including Louis Vuitton, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, and Prada.
But hurdles remain. According to Baron, the biggest two are budget constraints and getting photographers to shoot in an era when nearly every top talent is under contract with Condé Nast. “Even the photographers who aren’t locked up have been locked up,” he says. “People are worried that if they work for us, they’re not going to work for Vogue. (Or W, the other Condé Nast fashion magazine that Interview seems most clearly to be taking a run at.)

From time to time, Baron has also had to deflect some criticism in publishing circles that Interview under his leadership is gorgeous, while being somewhat unreadable. For display type, he favors giant capital letters that are crammed together. The articles often feature a font so small even a teenager with 20/20 could have trouble reading them. “I’m very aware of this,” says Baron. “It’s possible it’s a little bit harder to read. But you get so much more. You get the beauty, you get organization, and you get an experience that you would not get if I made it totally legible.”

If Baron doesn’t seem overly concerned with the words in his magazine, that might be because he’s a visual person who comes as much from an advertising sensibility as an editorial one. After growing up in Paris (where his father was a magazine art director), he moved to New York in the early 1980s and got a job as an assistant art director at GQ. He moved from there to an ill-fated startup called New York Woman, then took over at Italian Vogue and began doing Barneys’ groundbreaking ad campaigns with the photographer Steven Meisel and models Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell.

Since then, he’s been known for his prodigious use of white space (there's an almost arctic chill to everything he designs) and a tendency to align himself with projects that pushed sexual boundaries. The Calvin Klein “kiddie p*rn” spread? That would be one of his most famous campaigns. Madonna’s Sex book? He did the art direction. Baron’s said to be working on another coffee table book with the singer now—a massive retrospective of the queen of reinvention as photographed over the years by everyone from Herb Ritts to Steven Klein. “I’m not sure I’m supposed to talk about it yet,” he says, with characteristic self-restraint.

Despite having worked in fashion for decades, Baron purports to be a little flummoxed by the reaction some of his work gets here in the United States. In 2008, a Calvin Klein ad with a naked Eva Mendes was banned from U.S. television. A little while later, the company also generated controversy with a billboard that hinted at group sex. “Ten years ago, it was easier to do something than it is today,” Baron says. “People get offended by imagery way more than they used to. The Eva Mendes commercial I did? Honestly, you look at it and it’s not offensive at all. But they got letters and complaints. ‘Overtly sexual’ is what they called it. This country has become quite uptight. It’s, like, come on. I know the '60s are far away, but in Europe the same image doesn’t even get mentioned. They don’t care.”

Much as Baron doesn’t seem to care about the church-state divide between advertising and editing, he has even stepped behind the lens and done some fashion photography. Given that it’s basically a hobby for him, the results have been very well received. The late New York Times fashion critic Amy Spindler called his 2000 “Primal Scream” spread in W her favorite fashion editorial of the year. In the most recent issue of Interview, Baron photographed polo player and Ralph Lauren model Nacho Figueras, who then sits for a Q & A with the publication’s polo-playing owner Peter Brant. Says Bob Colacello, a former editor of Interview and friend of the Brants: “I told Peter he should put Nacho on the cover because he’s glamorous and it will get them a lot of Ralph Lauren advertising.” In the end, Baron apparently decided just to go with an inside spread, though it seems unlikely anyone had to twist his arm to do the shoot. Asked what brand he’d most like to work with but hasn’t yet, he says simply, “Ralph Lauren.”

Perhaps for his next act.

Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.