Men's Vogue has just appeared in the US, its target reader a moneyed, over-35, outdoors type, with a closet full of face creams. Know many of them? I don't, writes Anna Mundow
In a PG Wodehouse story from 1925, Bertie Wooster writes an article entitled "What the well-dressed man is wearing" for Milady's Boudoir, his aunt Dahlia's magazine. "Yes, indeed, Jeeves," he remarks. "I've rather extended myself over this little bijou. There's a bit about socks I think you will like." Then Jeeves, wrote Wodehouse, "took the manuscript, brooded over it, and smiled a gentle, approving smile. 'The sock passage is quite in the proper vein, sir.' " The publisher Condé Nast may like to think that Men's Vogue, which it launched this week in the US with tremendous fanfare, is daring if not downright revolutionary. There is George Clooney, after all, smouldering on the cover under the name Vogue, a title that has been identified solely with women's fashion for more than two centuries.
At the same time, that Bertie Wooster beat it to raising the male colours in a hitherto female preserve would surely delight the flagrantly Anglophile publishing house. With his private income, his elegant flat, his manservant, his wardrobe and his tastes, Bertie is, in fact, the epitome of a Men's Vogue man. As Thomas Florio, the magazine's publisher, recently put it, "Men's Vogue is very much talking to the guy who's living this life. It's not aspirational. It's not a shopping magazine. We're not teaching him how to drink Scotch." Good Lord, no.
The new quarterly is aimed at the affluent male, over 35 years old, earning at least $100,00 (€80,000) a year, who is interested in fashion, food, the arts, money, travel, home furnishings, outdoor pursuits such as sailing, and women. Well, perhaps women, or perhaps not. If women, then not in that way but for their minds.
The target reader, in fact, resembles Jay Fielden, the magazine's young editor. Fielden, a 35-year-old Texan, started out in 1992 as a typist at the New Yorker, eventually became an editor there and, in 2000, was hired as the arts editor of Vogue. Married with a second child on the way, he admits to worshipping Saul Bellow and recently told the New York Times that, being from Texas and living in New York, he is in a "unique position to understand this feeling that men have about their masculinity". Just what that feeling is, Men's Vogue must now try to pin down.
Confronting the hoary old question of what men want, Fielden's answer seems to be: among other things, a Swiss bank account, a $1.5-million-dollar watch, a $2-million dollar Hinckley yacht, some hunting, some tennis, a little wine, a little shopping, perhaps a little more shopping, and reliable skincare products. (We've lost Bertie at this stage, I'm afraid.) Above all, Men's Vogue man wants to be classy - sorry, is classy. He wants to read articles by New Yorker writers such as John Seabrook, Nick Paumgarten and Michael Specter, who bring to this new journal the pungent scent of Hemingway on safari or - in this issue, at least - the painter Walton Ford on a 400km hike in New England.
Men's Vogue man wants to know what Roger Federer thinks and what he keeps in his tennis bag; what it is like to be a guest at a weekend shooting party in England; how the architect David Chipperfield designed a New York town house for Nathaniel Rothschild; how mobile phones with GPS tracking systems perform; and what the artist John Currin looks like when he is posing for a Vogue photographer in his TriBeCa studio.
Are these truly the preoccupations of the 21st-century male? Perhaps physical fitness, waxing and skincare are becoming common obsessions in parts of the US, but in my relatively enlightened corner of small-town America the only guys riding bicycles are the ones who have had their driving licences suspended, and waxing still refers to automotive rather than personal care. Few of my New England neighbours will find Men's Vogue in their mailboxes alongside their monthly Northern Logger & Timber Processor and weekly Rock & Dirt. Condé Nast may boast that the fashion pages in Men's Vogue feature "real men" rather than models, but if those men look too real - too like my neighbours - the publishing house could find itself alienating buyers, just as the manufacturer of Dove Firming Lotion did with its "real women, real curves" billboard campaign. Although well received in Ireland and the UK, the advertisements have had to be withdrawn from many US locations because of the outrage, disgust and obscene graffiti they prompted. ("Fat cow" was the mildest.)
For all its gritty photography and manly stubble, Men's Vogue cannot afford to be too real and must not be at all proletarian. Competing head to head with the sniggeringly-titled Vitals, a luxury men's magazine launched in August, Men's Vogue must strike the perfect note with the ideal reader. To that end, Condé Nast distributed 400,000 copies of the trial issue to news-stands in affluent metropolitan areas and a further 200,000 to "target Condé Nast subscribers". In addition to its riveting features, readers will enjoy 164 pages of advertising sold for $28,500 (€23,500) a page.
"Well, did you ever wonder who are the guys on the arms of the women who read Vogue?" Thomas Florio retorts when asked who his new magazine is intended to seduce. Guys on the arms of women? That's right. Florio is betting that there is still plenty of marketing potential left in playing around with gender roles, if not actually reversing them; in portraying the hunky intellectual who can shoot rapids in the morning, read Proust in the afternoon, catch up on his ironing and then appear impeccably attired for cocktails to talk about his latest cosmetic surgery.
If one side effect of gender-role roulette is vanity, then so much the better, because Men's Vogue is, above all, a flattering mirror designed to reflect back to its owner a pleasing image not simply of himself but also of his mythical world, which in this case appears to be a 21st-century gentleman's club with broadband access and massage therapy. Jay Fielden insists that this rarefied world cannot be reached by reading GQ or Details - both other Condé Nast publications, by the way - and certainly not by reading juvenile organs such as Maxim, Stuff and FHM.
Perhaps, but those three publications have attracted five million new readers over the past few years while every leading men's magazine continues to lose gentlemen subscribers who are over 35. It remains to be seen whether even the call of the jolly old hunting horn, as Bertie Wooster might have put it, can lure them back.