Monday, May 12, 2008
It was gay then gender-bending then pure guy. Now, flailing for an identity, it's just gone.
Mar 21, 2000 | "When did you know you'd become toast?"
That was the question being put Monday to Marc Golin, the editor of Details -- a variation of the question Condi Nast editorial director (and original Details editor) James Truman had asked his staff on a retreat nearly a decade ago: "When did you know you'd become a man?"
The responses to the latter query ran a small gamut (acknowledgement from your father was a crucial component). But the answer to the question put to Golin could've been: "When I was told everything was just fine."
According to Golin and members of his staff, CN bigs Truman and President Steven Florio had given the ever-morphing men's magazine a vote of confidence just a few months ago. Then came Monday morning, and Florio announced that the company was folding Details as a CN publication. Starting October of this year, Details will be published as "a consumer counterpart to DNR, Fairchild's fashion trade newspaper for men," according to a press release.
Golin, who had been hired by CN from the bust-conscious men's mag Maxim last year, got the word moments before the general staff meeting and had not seen it coming.
"The March issue was starting to get there," he said after a long staff lunch of liquor and lobster. "It would have taken another year or two to get it where I wanted it."
If March was any indication, where he wanted Details to go was not the "lad mag" direction he had been accused of taking. Demonstrating a shocking lack of cleavage, the current issue includes a story by Executive Editor Bill Shapiro on what to do after your girlfriend's been raped.
"I can't see how anyone could call it a lad magazine in any way," says Golin. Shapiro adds, "You know what sells: fabulous breasts. And we never, never had a mandate to do that."
What they did have a mandate to do was simply to sell magazines. In its 10 years as a Condi Nast publication, Details has struggled for an identity as it has done battle with that ol' demon gender confusion.
In her book "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man," Susan Faludi did an excellent job of tracing the magazine from its rather gay origins to a more homophobic incarnation in the late '90s.
Annie Flanders' original Details emerged from New York's downtown club scene in 1982. By definition the scene was, if not gay, certainly gay-friendly. Indeed, an affinity for a mixed-up sexual culture seemed to be part of what CN was buying.
Details was bought by Advance Publications, owner of CN and Fairchild. In an early editor's note, Truman (who had been the pop music editor for Vogue and had wowed Anna Wintour with his wardrobe and sense of panache) wrote of a revelation he had experienced at a Depeche Mode concert in 1989. "I suddenly became aware that there was no unifying definition of masculinity in America," he wrote, and walking, eyes wide open, into that brave new sexual frontier, he set out to make a nontraditional men's magazine.
"I thought the original didn't work as a Condi Nast title," says John Leland, the first of four editors who would follow Truman in the editor's post. "As conceived by James, it would never get beyond a certain circulation." (CN spokeswoman Maurie Perl confirmed that the number expectations vary from company to company. According to her, Fairchild publications boast a circulation of 400,000-500,000, while CN magazines are expected to sell 800,000 "or above." The Audit Bureau of Circulation lists Details' current circulation as 541,710.)
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