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Tyler Brûlé sold
his magazine. Last fall, Time Warner had just lost Martha Stewart Living,
which its namesake/founder had bought back as part of a drive to consolidate
her empire. The communications giant had to fill a gap in its magazine
roster, and settled on Brûlé’s Wallpaper*. (Don’t bother looking for
a footnote; that asterisk is part of the title.) Even before its sale to
Time Warner, Wallpaper* had been anointed hippest, hottest
magazine-of-the-moment by the chattering classes. Calling it a magazine
isn’t really accurate, though. It’s not really a catalog, either. It’s got
pages and pictures, but it fakes so many different things at once and
crosses so many different lines and obliterates so many different standards
about how magazines are supposed to work that it achieves a kind of
transcendent truth. And all dreamed up by a guy from Winnipeg,
not a city known for producing cutting-edge style arbiters. But those roots
may have served as a prime motivator, the same way growing up in Pittsburgh sharpened Andy Warhol’s
appetite for fabulousness.
Ostensibly, it’s a
lifestyle guide for hipster types. Unlike other tomes of this kind (Architectural
Digest, for example), no scene in Wallpaper* exists outside its
pages. Magazines that focus on interior decorating are kind of catalogs
masquerading as magazines. But it’s not their fault, really. What do we
expect from AD or Elle Decor? Hard-hitting investigative
pieces on unscrupulous antique dealers? Medical exposés on high lead content
in that je ne sais quoi shade of paint for the breakfast nook?
Rather than be
tormented by the ethical conundrums that go with shifting details and
rearranging furniture for photographs of people’s living rooms,
Wallpaper* sidesteps the problem. The “interiors” depicted are
art-directed, designed and built to showcase advertisers’ products. After
they’ve been photographed, they’re pulled apart. The scenes are populated
with models cast and chosen with the same care and attention lavished on the
furniture.
The
fetishistically glorified merchandise is selected using elegantly simple
criteria: You don’t advertise, your stuff doesn’t get into the spreads.
Brûlé, by his own admission, doesn’t have to really “sell” advertising in
the traditional sense of the term. There are more advertisers who want to be
in the book than can be accommodated. Ad people at Wallpaper* are
less like a sales staff and more like bouncers hoisting the velvet rope on a
whim at the door to the club-of-the-nanosecond.
Would it surprise
anybody to learn that Brûlé came up with this idea while on drugs? Brûlé
caught a bullet on assignment for a British magazine in the Middle East.
Recovering, he was pumped full of morphine. He was tripping when the idea
for Wallpaper* came to him. As a former journalist, and one who left
journalism school to work in the field, Brûlé probably has a sharply focused
picture of just how porous and flimsy the church/state separation between
editorial and advertising is in the magazine business. Working for
fashion/lifestyle books such as The Face, he probably also got a good
look at just how selectively those separation standards are applied. So, he
might have reasoned, if it’s that much trouble, why bother with it at all,
especially when it’s so much easier and more profitable to eliminate it
completely?
As a result, you
get a publication that purports to be a guide to gracious living. It
features fake interiors, furnished with advertisers’ products (supplemented
with a “where-to-buy-it” appendix of sources and prices the reader needs to
be able to replicate any scene depicted in Wallpaper* at retail, and
decorated with pretty, pouting mannequins-for-rent. Don’t bother looking for
editorial content—you know, stories, articles, the kind of stuff that
usually goes along with the pictures in magazines. There are cutlines and
captions, but that’s about it. And they tell you what you’re looking at. To
paraphrase Linda Ellerbee, Wallpaper* is a magazine for people who
find television too complex.
The Canuck
hometown coverage of this situation is amusing; reporters work to maintain
two contradictory ideas simultaneously. With one hand, they applaud Brûlé’s
pluck and genius while subtly envying him his entrée into the glamorous
jet-set stratosphere—local-boy-makes-good, basically. With the other hand,
many of the same publications are chastising publications like Harry,
the fat slick sent out to the menswear retailers’ most valued customers and
sold on newsstands. There’s also a lot of disappointed tongue-clucking over
the Loblaws’ President’s Choice Magazine. But the sternest
admonitions are being flung at poor old Saturday Night. How dare it
get Absolut Vodka to sponsor an excerpt from a novel?
The result seems
to be a combination of championing Wallpaper* for its success as the
most shameless whore ever to emerge from the country while at the same time
dumping scorn on Canadian magazines for trying to maintain some kind of
nominal propriety or claim to editorial integrity.
Seen in the
context of Wallpaper*, Saturday Night looks like some quaint
relic of bygone editorial rectitude. Maybe that’s why it’s being scolded:
SN doesn’t go far enough. |
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