When it comes to fashion and women’s fashion magazines, size does matter. The monthly titles are all about how many pages they have, and how thick they are . For men’s fashion magazines, not so much. Just give men a few good suits, some shoes to go with them plus a few cool toys and they’re happy. Toss in a scantily clad young actress or two and men will sit and stare for hours. As for size, GQ is the biggest at 210 pages, Details has 204 and Esquire 184. But sometimes it’s not the size but what you do with it.
We always liked Esquire because it tried month after month to outstretch its rivals . March’s Style issue Editor David Granger does it again with plenty of real world fashion shot on guys we wouldn’t mind having a cocktail with. A first-person account, albeit a conceptual rehash, of trying to find the perfect pair of jeans is a nice touch. If you’re looking for a mag to keep it simple and direct when it comes to spring fashions, this one nails it. But when it comes to writing and editing, Esquire tries too hard to be hip. To paraphrase Clemenza in “The Godfather,” skip the stories, look at the photos.
GQ Editor-in-Chief Jim Nelson’s March issue dishes up more and more varied fashion than any other magazine. A 24-page feature on LeBron James and other NBA players is classic GQ, giving us people we want to talk about in clothes we’d love to own. The photos and clothes are presented so deliciously we can overlook the fact that the subject is so not new. Elsewhere, GQ’s stories are just offbeat enough — “The Mountains Where Women Live as Men” — to reel you in. That said, some items are just crazy, like the one on designer sneakers. Jim, shouldn’t you have run this in 1994?
Details Editor Dan Peres has a real problem with his March issue. Rivals have LeBron and Peter Dinklage on their covers and Peres is stuck with 10 mannequins. Or are they that group from the Sprint family TV ad? Perhaps we’ll never know. What we do know is that Details continues to be the most confounding fashion read out there. While pound for pound it gives readers more fashion than its rivals, it then gives us 10 shoes it says are “office-appropriate” but doesn’t tell us why.
With the 86th Academy Awards on Sunday, Vanity Fair offers up its annual Hollywood Issue and, as usual, Editor Graydon Carter turns in a superior effort. But we ask ourselves a certain chicken-or-egg question: Is the special issue so great because of the magazine’s Oscar party or is the Oscar party great because of the magazine? An excellent story on Hollywood animators and how many sprang from the California Institute of the Arts in the ’70s explains the talent behind some of today’s most popular movies. While men’s fashion mags feel the need to shoot the latest Hollywood or TV actress with barely nothing on (We’re not complaining, just reporting the facts) Carter also addresses the biggest story never to run in Vanity Fair: the much-anticipated Gwyneth Paltrow takedown. Turns out there never was a Paltrow takedown commissioned, Carter admits, just a look at America’s love/hate relationship with the actress.
The New Yorker spends 17 pages on its lead story about an ambitious fusion reactor in the south of France that’s way over budget and way behind schedule. According to reporter Raffi Khatchadourian, this reactor will essentially be a man-made star that could solve the planet’s energy needs forever. He chronicles exhaustively concerns about whether it will work, citing disturbing issues with the quality and compatibility of its parts. Yet he barely addresses the rather obvious question of safety, and what might happen if something goes wrong with this mini-sun that will be located a half-hour outside of Aix-en-Provence. So much for relaxing summers and carefree bottles of wine.
Alec Baldwin appears on the cover of the first biweekly New York to announce that he hates the media. If this weren’t confusing enough, he goes on to excuse his utterance of the word “c–r” while denying up and down that he ever said “f–t.” He’s threatening to leave New York for a big, walled-off house in LA. Elsewhere in the world of going oddly public with one’s supposed wish to get away from it all, we get a spread from a former heroin-addicted photographer who took pictures of himself while shooting up. We hate to say it, but Graham MacIndoe’s selfies strike us as a little cliche. The dimly lit rooms, the filthy, cluttered kitchen tables, the puke-colored bathroom walls. Frankly, we’re glad to hear he’s clean and getting out of the house with his camera again.
Time publishes a timely cover story on how air-traffic delays are managed. The trouble is, the answer — that they’re managed by a computer — is about as disappointing and tedious as an extended layover in Kansas City. The really irritating thing is that this knocked a far more important story off the cover — namely, the increasing influence of Super PAC research firms dedicated to swaying elections. It’s the Republican operations that get the attention, but Time admits Democrats may be even better funded. But what’s really pathetic is the defeated way we’re told that donors remain anonymous. “While politicians can usually figure out whose money is working against them, the electorate is often left to guess,” the mag reports.
Well, gosh, whose fault would that be?