plaining about a certain fashion zeitgeist, like the fact that people only wear jeans these days. We pride ourselves on our openness. Personally I think it’s great when people show up at the theater dressed entirely in denim—or even better: in rubber. As a magazine, we’re always motivated to do something that’s never been done before with every issue. We’d probably be out of business within a year if we appeared monthly. MD: So the fact that Fantastic Man
and Gentlewoman appear bi-annually is part of a larger strategy? Penny Martin: Absolutely. It’s often the case with magazines that appear every six months that they are treated as collectables . . . there are even slipcases for them. Lots of magazines produced today are more like books. It seems clear that there’s a demand for lasting content that the reader can refer back to a year later. GJ: It’s not enough for a magazine
to simply look and feel nice; content is key. Sustainability is really about the interdependence of these two factors. But it’s not always easy to push the envelope while at the same time creating something that’s built to last. Achieving both goals involves distinguishing what we do from your average conservative style guide, something we refuse to become. I mean, we’re detail-oriented, but you’ll never find us recommending a silk, ninefold Italian tie. That’s just boring. We leave that kind of thing to GQ. Here in England there’s a sort of fanzine for gentleman culture called The Chap where you can read all about how to carry an umbrella properly and where to find a good top hat. It’s scary to me that people actually take this stuff seriously.
MD: Fantastic Man and The
Gentlewoman tend to treat fashion as only one part of a larger conception of elegance, as if fashion is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of true style. I think it’s most apparent in the way both magazines present not only the models but also the clothes. There’s
immediacy in the images you present. GJ: I would say that first and fore-
Fantastic Man, Issue No. 3, Spring and Summer 2006, featuring the elegantly hirsute YSL designer Stefano Pilati.
most, our photography is known for its straightforwardness. Our fashion spreads are inviting because the reader is being directly addressed. It’s personal. This is how Fantastic Man radiates both a sense of optimism and accessibility. We’re interested in real men with real style and that’s why we’ll often have our models stand up straight in front of the camera with their hands on their hips. We’re not looking to waste paper— we don’t commission overly blurry or characterless photo spreads. If you want to show something, show it.
Anne Waak: But sometimes the most remarkable aspect of the images is what you don’t see, like when the models’ heads are cut out of the image entirely. PM: Headless models are a phenomenon that can be traced back to the second wave of the feminist movement, when the topic was hotly debated. We tend towards a balance; we feature plenty of faces, but also plenty of cropped shots. There’s also a third category of fashion spread that focuses specifically on the details and art of tailoring. We’ve also been working with still lifes, which emphasize the inanimate. Not everybody finds this third category accessible, but it does appeal to a certain readership, and it’s one that points towards the exclusivity of print media, I would say. GJ: It’s true, printed magazines
are becoming more and more exclusive. Gone are the days when people would buy twenty or thirty magazines a month; today it’s more like one or two. In the end it means that we kill fewer trees, and I think that’s something that was always important to us. But independently of environmental concerns, it was also important to create a thin magazine that you can roll up and take anywhere with you—on the bus, on a plane, to bed . . . Fantastic Man is around two hundred pages and
we have no interest in making it five hundred. It’s painful to think about how many trees die to create a newspaper like The Sun. Paper is an extraordinarily beautiful product, like cashmere or leather. It should be treated like the valuable raw material that it is. Quality should be the only justification for printing anything these days. MD: It didn’t take long for
Fantastic Man to earn a reputation as an international style bible. What do you do differently than everybody else?
GJ: Actually, it’s the other way
around; we do everything like everybody else used to do. We appropriate ideas that embody a timeless beauty from magazines that are twenty, thirty, and forty years old. . . and then apply them to what’s happening today. When Jop Van Bennekom and I started Fantastic Man in 2005, we spent ages sifting through Jop’s massive collection of old magazines, entire volumes of GQ, British Vogue, and Andy Warhol’s Interview. Art directors and photo editors back then did such incredible work! MD: You see Fantastic Man in line
with a certain aesthetic tradition— is that a stance against the idea of fashion as a string of transient trends, like your take on ephemera in the world of print? Do good ideas in fashion have no expiration date?
GJ: It’s interesting how many
perfect solutions there were to problems in fashion and design before our time, solutions that were whimsically rejected and replaced with something newer and much less thoughtful. I suppose it’s happened in practically every aspect of culture, but it’s really apparent in print and fashion.
MD: Traditionally, fashion and
lifestyle magazines represented the avant-garde of fresh and new ideas. Isn’t it their responsibility to blaze new trails?
GJ: Of course! That certainly
hasn’t changed. But having avantgarde pretenses doesn’t necessarily EB 3/2011
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