The new issue of aRUDE, an outsized independent style and culture magazine, is offering something new for its cover price of $9.95: empty pages. It\u2019s a \u201cvanity issue dedicated to Paris Hilton,\u201d said its Nigerian-born editor and publisher, Ik\u00e9 Ud\u00e9. Save for a Mondrian-inspired centerfold collage of the socialite herself, the issue contains only page after page of empty space, punctuated with questions to the reader. \u201cIs she a genius because she works smart and not necessarily hard?\u201d \u201cAren\u2019t you jealous of her?\u201d \u201cWho should she marry?\u201d Readers are instructed to fill in the blank space with their answers, artwork and any shout-outs to or about Ms. Hilton, then to return this material in the envelopes provided to aRUDE\u2019s headquarters on 17th Street in Chelsea, where the content will be scanned and re-edited into a \u201creal\u201d magazine, to be re-issued in late summer.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to democratize the editorial contribution in a magazine framework, where it\u2019s open to readers to become creators,\u201d said the Nigerian-born Mr. Ud\u00e9, whose contributors include the professional dandy and partygoer Patrick McDonald, F.I.T. professor Valerie Steele and reedy Russian model Larissa Kulikova. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like\u201d\u2014you know what\u2019s coming\u2014\u201ca blog in print, in a way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Just what is the deal with those expensive downtown glossies like aRUDE, euphemistically referred to as the \u201cstyle press\u201d?<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a term that came out of France, where magazines that were high-end boutique magazines would be called la presse de style,\u201d said David Renard, author of the recently released book The Last Magazine (Universe), in which he argues that the survival of the magazine-publishing industry at large lies in innovations made by the independents. \u201cBut instead of just being style as in fashion, style in essence means more design, in a sense, or trendy or cool.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lafayette Smoke Shop, located at the corner of Lafayette and Spring, is a hotbed of the pricey publications. \u201cAll tourists; many, many tourists\u201d is how the store\u2019s manager described his clientele\u2014along with the moneyed Soho residents who need to fill coffee-table space, of course.<\/p>\n
\u201cI bought one called SOON, in Chinese, French and in English\u2014$70 cover price!\u201d said Samir Husni, chair of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi and author of the annual Samir Husni\u2019s Guide to New Magazines, now in its 22nd year. \u201cYou can tell that those boutique magazines are done for the people within the industry, rather than the people outside the industry. It\u2019s a celebration of our inner circle. Most of them you can find in New York, but the minute you reach Des Moines, they\u2019re gone!\u201d<\/p>\n
But most of the style press is sustained not by newsstand sales but from ads taken out by\u2014and sometimes custom-designed by\u2014high-end fashion houses, retailers and other luxury brands. \u201cThere\u2019s no way they can make money without advertising,\u201d Mr. Renard said. \u201cThey\u2019d have to be selling at $20, $30 a piece\u2014sometimes that\u2019s impossible! They want to keep the American concept of low prices.\u201d<\/p>\n
To get the most desirable advertisers, editors have to woo first-rate style mavens, photographers and graphic designers\u2014usually friends or friends of friends\u2014to contribute work for free. (\u201cDiane\u201d\u2014as in von Furstenberg\u2014\u201cwill always take out an ad with us,\u201d Mr. Ud\u00e9 said.) Then they have to get the finished product into the right hands. \u201cIn New York, with the right wholesaler for New York City, you can make 500 copies look like you are everywhere. Everywhere!\u201d Mr. Renard said. \u201cTo whom? To the advertisers and to the tribe that you\u2019re trying to attract, let\u2019s say the downtown \u2018cool set.\u2019 Only 500 copies\u2014that\u2019s 30 stores.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most of the magazines are primarily visual, repositories for art photography. One exception is 032c, published by partners J\u00f6rg Koch and Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain out of Berlin; the latest issue, which will retail for $20.99, arrives in New York at the end of May and contains lengthy essays on contemporary art and politics. \u201cReaders are editors, artists, gallerists, architects, students at Columbia and N.Y.U., and, of course, fashion people\u2014designers, P.R., photographers, stylists,\u201d Mr. Koch said of his shiny export.<\/p>\n
Trace ($5.99) is one title that has extended its brand beyond print. In 2003, the magazine started Trace TV, a cable-television channel in France, which is now available in the U.S. on the Dish Network. In Trace\u2019s editorial offices on Broome Street, editors converse in a kind of lingua universale, lapsing from English into French and occasionally Spanish, with intermittent exclamations in other tongues. Editor in chief Claude Grunitzky, 36, the son of a West African diplomat who himself speaks six languages, founded the magazine in 1996 in modest digs in London. Over the next 10 years, he relocated the operation to downtown Manhattan and morphed into a kind of style-press mogul. The magazine is now published in three separate editions\u2014American, British and French\u2014with each distributed to appropriate linguistic markets worldwide. Mr. Grunitzky calls himself a \u201ccross-cultural guru.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you look at these \u2018style press,\u2019 what they give us is the cornerstone from which we can build the future for print,\u201d Mr. Husni grandly claimed. \u201cBecause those magazines cannot exist or have the impact that they have if they existed in any other medium \u2013 not online, not on TV.\u201d<\/p>\n
At any rate, Mr. Ud\u00e9 eagerly awaits the results of his little editorial experiment. \u201cIt\u2019s not easy to do this,\u201d he said. \u201cBut thank God it\u2019s not easy! If it would be easy, then every Dick and Harry would be doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The new issue of aRUDE, an outsized independent style and culture magazine, is offering something new for its cover price of $9.95: empty pages. It\u2019s a \u201cvanity issue dedicated to Paris Hilton,\u201d said its Nigerian-born editor and publisher, Ik\u00e9 Ud\u00e9. Save for a Mondrian-inspired centerfold collage of the socialite herself, the issue contains only page […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","spay_email":""},"categories":[4,10,22],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}