Anyone interested in what Glenda Bailey has done to Harper’s Bazaar is advised not to bother picking up the latest issue, hitting newsstands now. The September issue of any women’s magazine is something of a flagship, but the powers that be at Hearst are going to want to forget this 400-page monster ever happened.
The heft is pretty much the only impressive thing about it. The rest of it looks like it was put together by a headless chicken – a bit like the masthead on page 60, which amazingly doesn’t have an editor or editor-in-chief at all. Top of the list is the creative director, Michel Botbol, who probably won’t last much longer.
The front cover is OK at best, featuring a Patrick Demarchelier portrait of a heavily-made-up Nicole Kidman (kinda ironic, then, that the top strapline is “BEAUTY: How to Get the New Natural Look”). It’s ironic, too, that the first thing that falls out of the magazine when you open it is a blowout card touting subscriptions to Talk magazine – featuring Nicole Kidman on the cover. Also worth noting for a magazine which is meant to be at the top end of the market: an annual subscription runs to $10, which can’t even cover the cost of postage, and, at least on my copy, Nicole has nasty white spots under her left nostril and on her top lip, which look as though someone’s been cutting corners either at the printer’s or at the repro house.
Inside, it’s lowbrow fluff for at least 250 pages: the combination of front-loaded ads and front-of-the-book bite-sized-chunks seems to drag on indefinitely. It’s not done well, and it certainly doesn’t give the impression that the magazine is a window onto a rarefied, more glamorous world.
As we approach the feature well, we have to tiptoe our way around a “special advertising section” (that’s advertorial to you and me) which begins on page 207, takes a break on page 224, restarts on page 257, and continues until page 282.
Finally, on page 315, the fashion begins. This is the point of a fashion magazine, right? I mean, this is where Bazaar gets to show us what it’s all about. The first spread is by Patrick Demarchelier, of nothing in particular photographed against a plain background. Some of the photos are better than others, of course (the best, harking back to the Irving Penn glory days, is on page 330, if you’re reading along with mother), but the first one is dreadful, and none is excellent.
The second story, by Carter Smith, is the best thing in the book. It’s a fashion spread which ought to be the sort of thing Bazaar does in its sleep, but it turns out that the magazine is finding it harder than ever to get really high-quality fashion photography.
Because from then on in, it’s just depressing. Craig McDean, like Patrick Demarchelier, is obviously just snapping away in his sleep here: 12 pages of white girls in black frocks on white backgrounds. Then there’s Patrick Demarchelier’s Nicole Kidman story: it’s dreadful, once again against a plain background, with nothing approaching the quality of the cover photo. Sølve Sundsbø has a seen-it-all-before I’ve-been-looking-at-too-many-Nick-Knight-photos studio session, and then we’re back once again to Patrick Demarchelier portraits on plain backgrounds, first for a beauty story, then for a Marc Jacobs story, and then for a profile of an actor. That’s it.
Of 69 fashion pages, Patrick Demarchelier has shot 35, and might as well have shot Craig McDean’s 12 for all the respite they gave us. I’m sure he’s on some sort of long-term contract with Hearst which more or less forces them to give him lots of work, but this is ridiculous. He’s past it: while he can generally be relied on not to totally fuck up, filling your pages with Paddy D is not going to give you the kind of respect in the fashion world which Harper’s Bazaar desperately needs to regain.
The next issue should start to show Glenda’s hand: we’ll begin to see how she copes with a fashion title. The worry is that she’s going to bring the book downmarket, and less fashiony: I have a feeling that if she’s bright, she’ll go the other way, and try to drag it back upmarket from the middlebrow ditch into which it currently seems to have fallen. Kate Betts got fired for putting Britney Spears (shot, surprise surprise, by P.D.) on the cover of the August issue; I have a feeling Glenda Bailey’s not going to make the same mistake.
It’s 11:55pm, New York time, and I’m on Continental Airlines flight 31 from Newark to Sao Paulo. They’ve served the meal already – I accepted the mini-bottle of Cotes du Rhône – and I’ve also popped a couple of the Calmosedans I picked up in Santiago. They’re perfect for plane travel, especially red-eyes: they’re a combinatino of valium and sleeping pill. All the same, I’ve whipped out my laptop, and am writing this.
I was inspired by a sentence in the novel I picked up at the airport bookshop, Up in the Air by Walter Kirn. (It was the last copy in the shop, buried away in the K section of the fiction shelves, despite Christopher Buckley's rave New York Times review and the obvious affinity for airport passengers. I noticed as I was flicking through the opening pages that I’d wound up buying a First Edition. I haven’t got that far into it, but I’ve already decided that it’s an excellent book, and I highly recommend it: it’s kind of Brett Easton Ellis for the mild-mannered air traveller.) The narrator, who spends most of his life on airplanes, is sitting next to a woman. “I’d guess her age as twenty-eight or so, the point when working women first taste success and realize they’ve been conned.”
Well, that got me thinking. I was 28 when I left Bridge News (or BridgeNews, as it later rebranded itself), the company where I could finally call myself a journalist without thinking I was being economical with the truth, a company which paid me $5000 a month for my expertise in capital markets: a key number for me, the point at which I always thought that a person could be very comfortable, and beyond which money became a little bit pointless, meaningless, silly. And yet, notwithstanding the fact that I’m male and not female, I did indeed realise that I’d been conned. I knew it at the time, although I didn’t really know that I knew it: it was only after I qui^H^H^Hwas fired that the truth sank in.
I was miserable at Bridge; I knew that; and the freedom which came with not having to go into an office every morning; with not having to answer to a boss wanting to know what I was up to all the time; with being able to spend any day I liked in bed doing nothing (most importantly, being able to sleep in in the morning, rather than getting rudely awoken at 6:30 by my alarm clock); with being able to take weeks or even months off on holiday; with being able to surf porn sites on the internet without any fear of repercussion (not that I would ever actually do such a thing, of course); with interviewing bigwigs while sitting in my underpants in my living room; with walking the streets of Manhattan in the middle of the day, enjoying the sound of schoolkids playing in the yard across the street; with being able to go into shops during the day and not having to suffer the weekend crowds; with going into a Citibank ATM lobby without having to get my card out and swipe it to gain entrance: this was something I’d never really known before, and which I will be extremely loath ever to give up.
There’s an astonishing work culture where I live: even I fall into it, and feel weirdly uncomfortable when I’ve been with someone for any length of time and still don’t know what they do for a living. I don’t want people to judge me by my job, yet I judge them by theirs the whole time: I honestly don’t think I could ever be really good friends with anyone in sales.
But I think for Americans, a lot of the time, it’s worse. Without exception, the Americans I meet and who find out that I’m freelance assume that the minute I’m offered a “real” job, I’ll take it. I won’t, of course, and I think that the headhunters who were chasing me in the immediate aftermath of my departure from Bridge realised that. I haven’t heard from them in months, and I’d like to think that’s because they know that now I’m a tougher sell. (Of course, I don’t really think that’s true. They just happened to find out I’d left, and so did their job on me; now the job market’s even tighter than it was then, and they probably just have very little to offer me. Besides which, come mid-September, hundreds of ex-Bridge reporters will be hitting the streets in need of gainful employ.)
Is it true that the entire 28-year-old workforce is being conned? No, it’s not. There are a lot of 28-year-olds out there who either have a burning desire to make loads of money, or who need the security of a job. I don’t fall into either camp: I’ve been very lucky in that I grew up in a family which placed no kudos whatsoever on the size of your paycheck, and I also managed to get myself a fabulous I-1 journalist’s visa which allows me to stay in the United States more or less indefinitely.
But anyway, I think now I’m going to go back to the book for 10 minutes, and then try and get some sleep. Night night.