It was Bowie’s birthday yesterday, so happy belated birthday to him. It’s also a great reason to share images from this 1993 issue of Arena. Which covers his entire career and has a great feature on how his career faltered post ‘Let’s Dance’.

I’ll keep this one short and sweet. Esquire’s Chris Jones hosted a talk at Harvard with Gay Talese at the The Harvard Writers at Work series and any fan of writing, reading or Journalism should take some time out of their day to read it. It’s long but worth it. See it here

When did everything get so rugged? Everywhere you look there’s rugged boots, rugged shirts, rugged candles. You’d think someone was overcompensating. The latest trend is to call everything under the sun masculine, butch and rugged. It’s like reading through the diary of a factory worker. If they kept diaries.

It’s getting a bit much for me. Calling everything masculine is a nice way to get insecure men reading your site, but who cares about those guys? If you need to be constantly reassured that something is ’straight’ enough, you need some self esteem. It’s okay to have feminine traits, we’re people of the world after all. Chances are, if you’ve lived with your mother for about 16-18 years, you might’ve picked up a feminine trait or two.

So can we cut the shit? Candles aren’t masculine, but having a room that smells like sweaty basketball shorts isn’t masculine either. It’s reaching the point where things are resembling this level of over-masculinity:

These are genuine magazines, all taken from this interesting site, Men’s adventure magazines. As a magazine lover, it was an interesting find – first for the magazines and then to see how we’re slowly regressing to this image of ridiculousness (though the hemingway cover is pretty cool). The blog focuses on ‘pulp’ magazines from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s and amongst them you’ll see titles like ‘All Man’, ‘Man’s Action’, ‘Man’s True Danger’, ‘Man’s Daring’ & ‘World of Men’. I assume the 2010 equivalent would ‘Man’s trip to Liberty for rugged candles’.

You know when something’s so offensive it doesn’t even register? Or, to paraphrase Dave Chappelle, something’s so racist that all you can say is ‘that was racist!’ That’s what happened to me when I read the ‘black black’ paragraph in US Esquire’s Jay-Z profile. Before I even get into it, let’s take a look at the quote.

“Jay-Z is black black. He is old-school double-dark-chocolate-chunk black. He is black the way Labatt is blue. He is not white black, Barack black, like our president. Or the kind of black that doesn’t curse and deplores the n-word, the genteel black, like Oprah. He is, arguably, the first black-black guy to cross over into Oprah-land and Bill Clintonworld without making the Oprah-sized no-look-back forward flip that means you’re selling not necessarily your soul but perhaps something fleshier, a little more external.”

Let’s start with the quote ‘Old-school double-dark-chocolate-chunk black’. It’s a phrase so offensive I can’t believe it made it into print. Did no one read it and think that rating blackness on a chocolate based Richter scale could be viewed in a negative light?

Without breaking down the quote word for word, The main gist of it is that not there are levels of blackness and cultural traits that can be considered white or black. Barack Obama doesn’t fit into these, so he’s ‘white black’ – an offensive phrase whether it’s referring to his mixed race heritage or character traits. Oprah doesn’t make the cut either, as she’s one of the ‘genteel’ blacks. Never mind all she’s achieved, she doesn’t swear or call people nigger, so therefore isn’t black enough in the Taddeo’s book.

It’s rare that people call things racist nowadays, mostly because it’s become a slur on par with paedophilia, but the above quote is a racist one. I’m not saying Lisa Taddeo is a racist – I’m sure she has black friends, maybe even black black friends – but what she wrote is undoubtedly racist.

Everyone loves Monocle. This much is certified fact in the ‘menswear blogosphere’ as no one calls it. Whether you’re looking over its fashion spreads, aspiring to import your shelves from Switzerland or talking about how you and the editor went out for tea last night – everyone’s talking about Monocle.

But most people don’t know that Mr Brûlé’s Monocle wasn’t the first magazine called Monocle to exist. Steven Heller wrote an article about the original Monocle, which was an influential magazine back in the 50’s – which was said to have influenced the George Lois-designed Esquire of the sixties as well as New York and Spy magazine. Read the full article here.

This is what I’ve been watching over the weekend.

Found this VHS (I’m old school like that) version of Vertigo in the back of my wardrobe. Apart from having amazing coverwork, it’s also a great film – as to be expected from Alfred Hitchcock.

This is what I’ve been reading over the weekend.

I’ve talked about Men’s Non-No before, Man about Town has been covered by Style Salvage and everyone loves Monocle (lots of people love taking our pictures without linking back to us too, but thats another post)  so I’ll keep this post restricting to writing about Private Eye and Readymade: How to build (almost) anything.

Readymade: how to build (almost) anything is a great guide to making use of materials around you. You probably won’t make everything you see in the book – I know I won’t – but it’s a great eye opener to what can be acheived with some creativity.

I’ve talked about magazines around here a lot but I haven’t mentioned Private Eye, by far my favourite magazine out. For those who don’t know, Private Eye is a current affairs magazine that has some of the finest investigative reporting out there. It’s the only magazine I know that guarantees to give me the story behind the story.

Next Post: Style hard (my tribute to the slightly cheesy men.style feature)

Magazine design tends to have a distinct ‘follow the leader’ mentality. Hence why most fashion magazines nowadays look like Fantastic Man. Now design company Pentagram, with Luke Hayman leading it, are influencing magazine design in their own way. Now that Pentagram have blown up, Hayman has become a design version of super-prodcuer, lending his hand to a number of projects. They’ve redesigned everything from Vibe to 02138, Harvard’s luxury lifestyle magazine. The Pentagram blog has an in-depth post describing what they did to each magazine.

Vibe

Khaleej Times

Radar

Lanvin’s Lucas Ossendrijver is probably top of my interview fantasy list. With interviews the problems usually boil down to, ‘what can I say to make them open up?’ or ‘What can I say that they haven’t already answered 20 times before?’ Mr. Ossendrijver definitely falls into the second category.

He did do an interview and photo shoot with my second favourite menswear magazine Men’s Non-No (Fantastic Man is my favourite, in case you were wondering). I can’t read a word of Japanese, so I couldn’t tell you what he was saying, but the photos seem to suggest that the magazine were following him as he visits restaurants.

In a year where magazines were dropping like flies, it’s interesting to see how a magazine like Monocle has become such a great success.

Although the internet has been part of the daily routine for years now, most magazines still haven’t got the hang of not making their websites work in tandem with the print publication, rather than making it look like an afterthought.

Monocle’s online team leader, Dan Hill posted an extremely extensive (I can’t stress this enough, it’s really long) overview of the Monocle launch and how they went about the print publication, the website and the relation between the two. It’s well worth a read if you like Monocle, or just magazines in general.

George Lois will go down in history for making some of the most iconic magazine covers ever. As one of my personal heroes, he broke taboos and made covers that no one else could possibly have thought of. His website details his Esquire covers, providing commentary alongside each cover to explain the reaction to each cover at the time. While all the stories deserve a read, I think this Sonny Liston picture has a great story behind it, which I’ll leave George to tell:

Now go waste a couple of hours reading the rest of his Esquire cover stories over at his site.