Details Magazine Made Me a Rebel Consumer
White, Keith
How Details Magazine Turned Me Into a Rebel Consumer By merchandising nonconformity, CondeNast's newest star has found a niche and 465,000 readers. But living the Details life could cost you a...
...While TV offered the mass marketer the mass consumer, magazines became venues where advertisers could reach a more specific audience, the "top of the pyramid," the segment that would consume their most upscale products...
...But my greatest disappointment came in a more recent issue...
...The New Yorker, after all, catered to the over-30 crowd, not generally the sort insecure enough about themselves to be easy marks...
...Nonconformity may be the language, but fashion is, as ever, the logic...
...The clear implication was that Florsheim shoes were lousy because they were so available, and thus so damn middle class...
...Lollapalosers Details may also be outpaced by its own definitions of hip, but don't count on that happening any time soon...
...This statement of regret seems directed less to readers than to the magazine's true clients, the real Details men—the guys who manufacture these trends and make money off them: the editors and the advertisers...
...Reading through the list—glam revival, cyberpunk revolution, jazz rap, girl grunge, Tabitha Soren—brought back painful memories, like the time I had showed up at a party wearing a tight purple jumpsuit and eyeliner only to find the room full of Beavis and Butthead manques...
...The mannequins on which Details hangs its expensive clothes are rebels, with real tattoos to show how close they live to the edge...
...Whatever moves the magazines...
...ray of consumer choices...
...These are, of course, the fabled "twentysome-things," the by now monotonous subject of film, news program conjecture, and solemn editorial head-shaking...
...That's a kind of nervousness that is only exacerbated as one grows older and less daring, feeling further removed from the latest in youth culture...
...How was I going to pass myself off as an aficionado of all these disparate trends when I knew nothing about them...
...Another time it divulged which expensive home video games are preferred by the members of Faith No More...
...And, helpfully, the products pushed—swishy liqueurs, silk ties—were tantalizingly affordable...
...I got a particularly menacing tattoo on my neck, bought the sort of car Anthony Kiedis drives, purchased some of Iggy Pop's brand of underwear, and wore one of Michael Stipe's characteristic hats...
...After all, it was the dollars of eager advertisers that helped keep magazines like The New Yorker, New York, Vanity Fair, and until recently, Spy, afloat despite the development of television and cable...
...With pronouncements on this book and that art exhibit, ads for the "correct" scotch and "right" clothes, The New Yorker functioned as a kind of consumer finishing school...
...What panic and dyspepsia must have set in when hordes of older readers woke to discover that their beacon of chic had been deemed dowdy...
...Not that catering to the needs of the status-anxious is anything new...
...While I was spending my money, I thought I'd better pick up a few packs of Excita condoms, some sex-technique videos, and a few muscle building machines (all helpfully advertised in the back of each issue...
...News & World Report, Advertising Age, and Business Week, was not cultural expression, but some way of serving us up to the national marketers...
...It wasn't enough to know to send your kids to boarding school, it was a matter of which one—and, to be sure, there was always at least one out of the reach of most New York readers...
...I had recognized my need for bee-stung lips, carefully unkempt hair, a washboard stomach, baggy Versace suits, tattoos—you get the picture...
...How on earth was I going to reinvent myself month after month with the latest cool identities...
...For instance, in a piece about the demise of Times Square, the magazine approvingly sneered that it might "make Florsheim shoes harder to come by...
...What the media wanted, when it talked about the undefined and mysterious "twentysomethings" in articles like those in U.S...
...Others articles further impressed on me the magazine's guiding vision of alternative as a set of consumer choices...
...These "Rock and roll samurai live outside the law, but are bound by their own moral codes...
...New York provided the goods—the inside dope on how to go about assessing such decisions—but in doing so, it raised the stakes...
...I could just about hear the tension in his voice as he uttered those words, even as I saw my own future pass before my eyes...
...For implicit in such guidebooks was a new hierarchy...
...Look what Absolut did for plain old tasteless vodka in the eighties...
...When Details pushes expensive bathing costumes, it pairs them not with suntanned frat boys, but with skinhead men with tattoos, Doc Martens boots, and leather jackets emblazoned with the names of hard-core bands from the eighties...
...I wanted to pal around with other young sophisticates dressed just as rakishly as I, chatting about the latest trend in alternative music and last week's party with Drew, Ethan, Uma, and Keanu...
...But living the Details life could cost you a fortune BY KEITH WHITE I wanted to be a Details man...
...Recognizing the success of early articles in this genre, New York took to offering readers pullout guidebooks on topics which The New Yorker would consider too vulgar to mention: where to ski, which summer house to buy, which private schools to send your children to—purchasing decisions new to most readers...
...The eighties saw the advent of Spy and Vanity Fair, which wove the "how tos" of taste and purchasing into the very text of each article...
...In effect, The New Yorker traded on its literary cachet to play arbiter in the evermore convoluted status game...
...Spin might tell me how to dress and behave like Eddie Vedder, but its narrow focus—music—would leave me in the dark about important developments in ice climbing and seventies collectibles...
...the cool explained itself, or more precisely it was cool because the folks on the masthead had decided it was so...
...Tucked away in the back pages of the magazine was an elaborate apologia to all readers who had been led astray by the misfires of Details' cultural divining rod...
...Details had the answer...
...It even had a feature showing me how to alter my clothes so it looks like I've been a punk rocker for years...
...It treated me to a photo spread featuring Perry Farell, Billy Idol, and a member of the Stone Temple Pilots posing in the latest designer clothes...
...In the end, Details' message is no different than any other lifestyle magazine: Who you are depends on what you consume, and how hip you are depends on how enthusiastically you keep up with the new...
...These attributes are presented as virtues in themselves...
...When fortysomething columnist and CNN pundit Michael Kinsley showed up at a party for Doug Coupland, the hot and newly anointed voice of "Generation X" (Coupland's own coinage), Kinsley told a reporter that he was there because he "wanted to know what the other generation is thinking...
...The magazine added sinew to this potentially effeminate image by adopting the look of the early American punk scene, even recruiting rocker Henry Rollins to become part of the Details glitterati...
...These guys are not only musicians, or even rock stars," the magazine affirmed, "but modern men, emblems of a new masculinity...
...After drinking in a few issues, I was ready to become a Details man...
...But while spending and acquiring increasingly became sanctioned ends in themselves, questions remained about how to assess individual performance in the new taste wars...
...That was because New York offered a particularly fragile sort of status—the fashionable kind—and it wanted to make sure its readers remained uncomfortable enough to keep coming back for more from those truly in the know: namely, the editors...
...Those unattainable schools or apartments or summer homes were there to keep those who might feel they had it sussed just a little off-kilter...
...Details wisely targets the more insecure pre- and post-college types...
...The trio of British men's fashion mags (The Face, Arena, and Sky) were simply too expensive and too derivative for my tastes...
...As the magazine counseled readers on consumer selections, it grew fat with the ad pages of companies eager to reach this captive and suggestible audience...
...Details, with its $2 cover price and its relentlessly macho attitude, promised to deliver the new me...
...Yet as the process of acquiring status became more complicated, readers sought more explicit instruction in the art of the buy...
...Details saw the opening for a magazine which could accomplish this goal...
...After all, the magazine had its start as a hip downtown club sheet and chronicler of the Manhattan fashion scene, formidable credentials in my generation's worldview...
...Ironically, Donald Trump, one of the magazine's favorite targets, showed up on the cover of Vanity Fair the same month that Spy's imminent death was made public...
...When anyone could earn a sheepskin, how were you supposed to prove your refinement...
...many publications proved happy to play the role of discriminating doyenne...
...Just about anyone could save up and buy a seersucker suit from Brooks Brothers, if only once a year...
...Elements of that creativity include a column called "Hardware," devoted to items a would-be urban hipster should own, a monthly travel piece going so far as to give the phone numbers of the Detai/s-approved places in which to hang out and spend your money, and an ongoing parade of new looks from the purveyors of too-expensive clothing and attitude...
...Details is a sort of Sears catalog with 'tude, the fabulous intermediary between the latest offerings of the nation's clothing and entertainment industries and excitement-starved people like me...
...It was then that postwar prosperity and the GI Bill made a college education widely available, thus debasing the undergraduate diploma as the preeminent emblem of achievement and sophistication...
...And like Pearl Jam, Details knows how to translate nonconformity into sales...
...But the magazine knew its craft...
...Baffler co-editor Thomas Frank provided additions to this article...
...Once advertised in a magazine with trend-setting readers, any product can thus be differentiated and command a premium price from those nervous about their hip credentials...
...Spy played this game well, but apparently not well enough...
...And with its utilitarian, punk-inspired typeface and its fractured layout, a reader intent upon learning the secrets of youthful rebellion can be assured Details is serious about delivering...
...With the combination of Conde Nast's deep pockets, tremendous newsstand clout, and its unifying vision of the rebel as consumer, Details' circulation has leapt from 150,000 to over 450,000 in less than four years...
...A $900 silk shirt was photographed with the instructions, "Wear it loose with tight jeans and a rock and roll attitude...
...And Details understood my abiding anxiety about falling behind the curve, and failing to purchase and display the appropriate books and CDs, emblems that would show that I, too, flouted convention...
...Despite the whirlwind of trends, Details retains a unifying philosophical viewpoint: The archetypal American male is a rebel consumer...
...The words used to describe this new man were exciting and fresh: explosive, individualist, all for one, self-styled, rebellious, existential, heroic, and—most appealing of all—nonconformist...
...As members of the new middle class scrambled to improve their social standing, they were eager to adopt the accouterments of their social betters...
...The point was never to argue for the cool...
...Vanity Fair writers used the vehicle of celebrity profiles to offer hints to readers about which brands of Italian loafers and mineral water were suitable...
...The magazine chronicles what I should buy, what I should wear, where I should go, what I should see, and what mass-culture offerings I should choose from...
...We Americans, as the Monthly has argued in the past, have long looked to magazines to guide us through the dizzying arKeith White is co-editor of The Baffler magazine...
...Setting out right away, I got myself a few baggy suits and bought a copy of Rollins' poetry to display from my back pocket...
...Details never introduces a new youth fashion without painstakingly delineating its rebel credibility...
...The man who put Trump in Vanity Fair: editor-in-chief Graydon Carter, one of Spy's original founders...
...I couldn't get what I needed from stodgy old Esquire or pretty-boy GQ...
...The difficulty with this approach in the nineties, of course, has been in developing a new segment, finding a package with the right credentials to slip past the ultra-sophisticated media sensors of a younger set of consumers...
...I think of Details as the Pearl Jam of the magazine world, the glittery showplace where rebellion, individualism, and nonconformity are conveniently packaged and paired with all of the correct accessories...
...As the half-life of fashionable status became ever more compressed, these monthlies strained to stay one step ahead, keeping their readers slightly off-balance and anxious about their own standing on the tote board of hip...
...New York's success was confirmed by a rash of identical glossies that emerged in most American cities...
...Perhaps this shouldn't have been such a shock...
...Furthermore, Details was offering to show me how to buy the appropriate gear so I could become just as individualistic...
...But the people I really felt sorry for were the folks whose warehouses were full of now-unwanted platform spaceboots, minidisks, and virtual reality machines—trends which had received countless editorial pages as Details valiantly tried to convince its readership of their viability...
...Unfortunately, all of this paraphernalia cost me $150,000, and I was still behind the times—the next month's issue had just hit the newsstand...
...That's where magazines came in...
...The idea was to try to get us to care about and try to quench our own particular status anxiety and, eventually, to part with our money...
...A recent issue that featured $300 silk Versace shirts also included a revealing apotheosis of Lolla-palooza performers Anthony Kiedis and Henry Rollins as the quintessential men of the nineties...
...Not spelling this out was typical of Spy's approach to what's-hot-and-what's-not journalism...
...In the late sixties and early seventies, Clay Felker brought to life his vision of the chic, upscale, fantasy magazine for the urban middle class with New York, which was designed for a new generation of readers...
...Absent is any sense that the magazine's self-styled, rebellious, existential hero should do or strive for anything beyond consuming...
...The roots of this tendency, indeed the roots of Details' beguiling come-on, are easily traced to the years immediately following World War II...
...Hypes and Sleepers" was a year-end scorecard on how the prognostica-tors had fared over the previous twelve months...
...Spy's innovation was offering helpful consumer hints in the guise of snobbish put-downs...
...A $900 silk shirt was photographed with the instructions, "Wear it loose with tight jeans and a rock and roll attitude...
...Even as it asserted its bona fides, New York promised to offer more and clearer signals about how to consume...
...Readers are presumably thankful, having been given both valuable information on how to plan their next purchase as well as nifty cocktail party trivia and handy opinions...
...And with so many parvenus blessed with large discretionary incomes, how were you supposed to distinguish yourself from others in the newly monied masses...
...If ever thicker copies of the magazine weren't enough to prove its success, the people behind Details knew that it had pleased the right audiences when Advertising Age named it "Magazine of the Year," citing it for having "established itself as the leading media vehicle to reach Generation X." Indeed, publisher Mitchell Fox boasted of "delivering these twentysomething people to marketers in whatever way we can...
...Perhaps the real secret to being a Details man lies in the magazine's recent apology: "Mass taste is perverse and unpredictable, [but] that's also why keeping tabs on it is so much fun...
...It didn't just fill me in about grunge, it gave me an encapsulated history of the movement, so I could wow my friends with my firm grasp of alternative arcana (Did you know that the Smashing Pumpkins' lead singer had a fling with Courtney Love while Kurt Cobain was still sleeping on the Melvins' front porch...
...It showed me that I, too, could show the appropriate level of insouciance by lying down on my office couch while wearing the expensive clothes of designer Calvin Klein...
...Recognizing that Details was the real thing, my quest to become a Details man was hampered by an unnerving fear...
...With king-of-the-mountain bravado, Felker signaled his own magazine's arrival with fillips at the fusty, passe New Yorker...
...What exactly is wrong with Florsheim shoes—they seem sturdy and stylish enough to the untrained eye—is a question left unanswered, the kind of if-you-have-to-ask omission designed to draw readers in and make them feel happily allied with the magazine's sense of humor as well as its commercial appetites...
...Hemorrhaging talented editors and ad pages for years, the magazine which made its name lampooning the rich of the eighties seemed to wither with the scene that it loved to roil, and in February announced that it would soon expire...
...A one word solution was discovered: Taste...
...When Details pushes expensive bathing costumes, it pairs them not with suntanned frat boys, but with skinhead men with tattoos...
...For a solid 20 years, beginning in the forties, The New Yorker emerged as the dominant voice of taste—a reign remarkable not just for its duration, but for its demographics...
...Whereas traditionally the rich could rely on the customs of heritage ("Always shop at Brooks Brothers"), the middle class was attempting to camouflage its roots...
Vol. 26 • January 1994 • No. 4
