Tweet
Thanks to whoever alerted me to it on my blog. This is a great article and it gives me hope that fashion magazine industry is not a complete wasteland, that there is some food for though to be found. I am also happy they are not afraid to be critical. Getting down on your knees in front of the advertiser's unzipped pants is too of a common story in magazine publishing industry. I need to check out the mag.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/...lin.php?page=1
A new breed of fashion magazines comes into vogue
Monday, August 20, 2007
BERLIN:
He flips for a few moments through the latest issue of 032c before
finding the article he's looking for. "KL XXL" is the headline above
the short, scathing review of the photographic talents of the Chanel
designer Karl Lagerfeld, following his recent show at the C/O Gallery
in Berlin. "The Emperor's New Photos" reads the sub-headline.
"This," says Jörg Koch, pointing at the story, "means we will never
get Chanel advertisements. But it's good for the magazine in the long
run." Given the state of the publishing industry, it's difficult to
imagine those words coming out of the mouth of any editor, let alone
the creative director of a fashion magazine. But in the kitchen of his
apartment, where Koch's wife, Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain, is making
quiche, and his daughter, June, is showing off new presents, the
Teutonic austerity and considerable sway of the Chanel don seem very,
very far away.
Below the radar of the mainstream, but required reading for the
movers and doyennes of the art and fashion world, magazines like 032c
are successfully finding a niche while serving as a glimpse of the
future of a publishing industry in flux. Titles like "Purple," from
France, "Fantastic Man" from the Netherlands, and "Self-Service" from
Paris exploit the overlapping fields of art, architecture and music
that fashion has become. They are printed on expensive stock, look like
art catalogues, sell at specialized shops across the world for prices
beginning at ?10, or $13.50, and have a devout following. "I do think
with the whole Internet, people expect magazines to be more special,
and to become a bit more of a design experience, a tactile experience,"
says the Dutch graphic designerJop van Bennekom.
In the last 10 years, van Bennekom has introduced three such titles.
"Butt," a gay alternative magazine printed on salmon paper,
commemorated its five-year anniversary last year with a book by the art
publisher Taschen. "Fantastic Man," which van Bennekom started in 2005
with his partner Gert Jonkers in Amsterdam, is a biannual publication
that explores the lives of fashionable rich people, like the hotelier
André Balazs and the former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, but
avoids collection reviews or styled fashion shoots. Van Bennekom, who
also published Re Magazine, said he thought that niche publications had
to find their "own take on fashion."
The initial issue of 032c was printed on newsprint and called itself
a fanzine. Its cover featured a giant red square, a reference to the
color in the Pantone Matching System for which the publication is
named. Far from creating a fashion magazine, Koch, a freelance
journalist who ran a gallery, and von Mayer-Myrtenhain, a documentary
producer, created the publication as a way to win attention for the
032c Web site they had started. Koch's vague idea was to "make a
fashion magazine without fashion." It soon took off.
In the coming months, 032c will move offices - from Koch and von
Mayer-Myrtenhain's apartment to a building which will also provide
enough space for a small store. Koch's idea is to sell the best in
men's clothing basics: the best white dress-shirt, the best winter
jacket, and so forth.
As Bennekom put it, early issues of 032c captured the spirit of
Berlin at the time: the former Dior designer Hedi Slimane was shooting
photographs of punk kids and galleries, and nightclubs were being
carved out of abandoned factory and government buildings. Subsequent
issues reflected both Berlin's growing attraction to foreign artists
and designers and the blurred lines between formerly disparate scenes
like art and fashion.
032c's fashion spreads resembled art pieces, and vice versa. When
the photographer Steven Klein, a fan of 032c, offered to shoot Brad
Pitt, he covered the actor's shaved head in different shades of paint.
Pitt was unrecognizable (and didn't make the cover). "Fashion has been
one of the lead disciplines of visual culture," says Koch. "That's why
fashion is in there. If we had done this 30 or 40 years ago, it would
have been film and theater. But fashion is far too important to be
limited to Vogue."
In the 12 issues since, Koch, von Mayer-Myrtenhain and the respected
graphic designer Mike Meiré have created a magazine that has found
success breaking the conventions of the very disciplines it covers.
It's an art magazine that provides context, an architecture magazine
that actually criticizes buildings and a fashion magazine that offers
up the musings of academics as collection critique.
"You start reading it, and there's very theoretical exposés on urban
development placed next to a fashion spread," says van Bennekom, a 032c
fan. "It makes it pretentious, and maybe makes the fashion
unpretentious." Blessed, as it is, with a loyal following among both
readers and advertisers, 032c can afford it.
The magazine is almost arrogant in its lavish use of space and utter
disregard for mainstream design. The most recent issue, the
best-selling one yet, cropped Andreas Gursky's enormous shots of North
Korea and used fonts last seen in the mid-1980s. As brash is its
content, which can range from the brilliant to the tediously esoteric.
While early 032c issues focused on Berlin, the magazine's success in
Tokyo, Paris and New York and among influential players from Rem
Koolhaas, a contributor, to Tom Cruise has enabled it to grow and
expand its content. Among the articles in recent issues have been
reprinted short stories by Bruce Chatwin and Thomas Pynchon, a profile
of the Tokyo architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, and a
nine-page interview with the Berlin professor Herfried Münkler on the
post-heroic age.
"They've got a very original choice in writers, because they choose
them for their competence, not because they work there," says the
German artist Thomas Demand. "It's a surprisingly lean concept of
running a mag, which enables them to start from the beginning for each
issue and have total freedom again and again. I think that's the future
of magazines.
"I have a romantic notion of the magazine," Koch says. "I believe in
the 'A' for effort principle. You have to make an effort to read the
pieces." Long interviews with Berlin professors, excerpts from the
journal of the German director Werner Herzog from 1970, long treatises
on the post-fossil age - none of that seems to concern advertisers, who
continue to buy up space at ?6,000 for a two-page spread.
"If you don't care about content you wouldn't publish something"
like the Münkler interview, Koch says. "This is not the stuff that
advertisers are into. That's the true success of 032c. That we can
attract Dior Homme and still run these types of articles."
That, and the fact his magazine has been allowed to grow and
experiment unfettered by financial pressures. Koch has Berlin to thank
for that. And, in lending credibility to an slow-evolving fashion and
art scene, 032c has already begun repaying its debt.
Comment