BERLIN: He flips for a few moments through the latest issue of 032c before finding the article he's looking for. "KL XXL" is the headline above the short, scathing review of the photographic talents of the Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld, following his recent show at the C/O Gallery in Berlin. "The Emperor's New Photos" reads the sub-headline.
"This," says Jörg Koch, pointing at the story, "means we will never get Chanel advertisements. But it's good for the magazine in the long run." Given the state of the publishing industry, it's difficult to imagine those words coming out of the mouth of any editor, let alone the creative director of a fashion magazine. But in the kitchen of his apartment, where Koch's wife, Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain, is making quiche, and his daughter, June, is showing off new presents, the Teutonic austerity and considerable sway of the Chanel don seem very, very far away.
Below the radar of the mainstream, but required reading for the movers and doyennes of the art and fashion world, magazines like 032c are successfully finding a niche while serving as a glimpse of the future of a publishing industry in flux. Titles like "Purple," from France, "Fantastic Man" from the Netherlands, and "Self-Service" from Paris exploit the overlapping fields of art, architecture and music that fashion has become. They are printed on expensive stock, look like art catalogues, sell at specialized shops across the world for prices beginning at €10, or $13.50, and have a devout following. "I do think with the whole Internet, people expect magazines to be more special, and to become a bit more of a design experience, a tactile experience," says the Dutch graphic designerJop van Bennekom.
In the last 10 years, van Bennekom has introduced three such titles. "Butt," a gay alternative magazine printed on salmon paper, commemorated its five-year anniversary last year with a book by the art publisher Taschen. "Fantastic Man," which van Bennekom started in 2005 with his partner Gert Jonkers in Amsterdam, is a biannual publication that explores the lives of fashionable rich people, like the hotelier André Balazs and the former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, but avoids collection reviews or styled fashion shoots. Van Bennekom, who also published Re Magazine, said he thought that niche publications had to find their "own take on fashion."
The initial issue of 032c was printed on newsprint and called itself a fanzine. Its cover featured a giant red square, a reference to the color in the Pantone Matching System for which the publication is named. Far from creating a fashion magazine, Koch, a freelance journalist who ran a gallery, and von Mayer-Myrtenhain, a documentary producer, created the publication as a way to win attention for the 032c Web site they had started. Koch's vague idea was to "make a fashion magazine without fashion." It soon took off.
In the coming months, 032c will move offices - from Koch and von Mayer-Myrtenhain's apartment to a building which will also provide enough space for a small store. Koch's idea is to sell the best in men's clothing basics: the best white dress-shirt, the best winter jacket, and so forth.
As Bennekom put it, early issues of 032c captured the spirit of Berlin at the time: the former Dior designer Hedi Slimane was shooting photographs of punk kids and galleries, and nightclubs were being carved out of abandoned factory and government buildings. Subsequent issues reflected both Berlin's growing attraction to foreign artists and designers and the blurred lines between formerly disparate scenes like art and fashion.
032c's fashion spreads resembled art pieces, and vice versa. When the photographer Steven Klein, a fan of 032c, offered to shoot Brad Pitt, he covered the actor's shaved head in different shades of paint. Pitt was unrecognizable (and didn't make the cover). "Fashion has been one of the lead disciplines of visual culture," says Koch. "That's why fashion is in there. If we had done this 30 or 40 years ago, it would have been film and theater. But fashion is far too important to be limited to Vogue."
In the 12 issues since, Koch, von Mayer-Myrtenhain and the respected graphic designer Mike Meiré have created a magazine that has found success breaking the conventions of the very disciplines it covers. It's an art magazine that provides context, an architecture magazine that actually criticizes buildings and a fashion magazine that offers up the musings of academics as collection critique.
"You start reading it, and there's very theoretical exposés on urban development placed next to a fashion spread," says van Bennekom, a 032c fan. "It makes it pretentious, and maybe makes the fashion unpretentious." Blessed, as it is, with a loyal following among both readers and advertisers, 032c can afford it.
The magazine is almost arrogant in its lavish use of space and utter disregard for mainstream design. The most recent issue, the best-selling one yet, cropped Andreas Gursky's enormous shots of North Korea and used fonts last seen in the mid-1980s. As brash is its content, which can range from the brilliant to the tediously esoteric.
While early 032c issues focused on Berlin, the magazine's success in Tokyo, Paris and New York and among influential players from Rem Koolhaas, a contributor, to Tom Cruise has enabled it to grow and expand its content. Among the articles in recent issues have been reprinted short stories by Bruce Chatwin and Thomas Pynchon, a profile of the Tokyo architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, and a nine-page interview with the Berlin professor Herfried Münkler on the post-heroic age.
"They've got a very original choice in writers, because they choose them for their competence, not because they work there," says the German artist Thomas Demand. "It's a surprisingly lean concept of running a mag, which enables them to start from the beginning for each issue and have total freedom again and again. I think that's the future of magazines.
"I have a romantic notion of the magazine," Koch says. "I believe in the 'A' for effort principle. You have to make an effort to read the pieces." Long interviews with Berlin professors, excerpts from the journal of the German director Werner Herzog from 1970, long treatises on the post-fossil age - none of that seems to concern advertisers, who continue to buy up space at €6,000 for a two-page spread.
"If you don't care about content you wouldn't publish something" like the Münkler interview, Koch says. "This is not the stuff that advertisers are into. That's the true success of 032c. That we can attract Dior Homme and still run these types of articles."
That, and the fact his magazine has been allowed to grow and experiment unfettered by financial pressures. Koch has Berlin to thank for that. And, in lending credibility to an slow-evolving fashion and art scene, 032c has already begun repaying its debt.
