Vogue Answers: What Do Men Want?

By CATHY HORYN
The New York Times

MEN have never exactly been alien to Vogue. Winston Churchill posed in the uniform he wore to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, Ernest Hemingway lounged bare-chested in Cuba, and the clowns of "Monty Python's Flying Circus" did the full monty. We saw Hitchcock's pear-shaped profile and Mick Jagger's lips - or, as Tom Wolfe put it around the time that he himself was photographed in Vogue, by Irving Penn: "This boy has exceptional lips. He has two peculiarly gross and extraordinary red lips. They hang off his face like giblets."

You can't say that Vogue has ever neglected distinguished men. Still, the news that Big Mama has spawned an offspring called Men's Vogue may come as a surprise to even the more liberal-minded sons (and daughters; let's be fair) of the feminist generation. Men's Vogue, which arrives on newsstands Sept. 6, joins Teen Vogue as the latest spinoff of this Condé Nast title under its editor, Anna Wintour, who is already brooding on Vogue Living.

Jay Fielden is the editor of Men's Vogue. A soft-spoken, likable Texan, Mr. Fielden, 35, began his career in 1992 in the typing pool at The New Yorker, which was sort of the literary equivalent of the mailroom at William Morris. "All I had to do was learn how to type," he said in a yonder-lies-the-cottonwood drawl.

He eventually became an editor, and in 2000 Ms. Wintour hired him to be the arts editor of Vogue. She said that Mr. Fielden was her first choice to run Men's Vogue after S. I. Newhouse Jr., the chairman of Advance Publishing, the parent company of Condé Nast, suggested to her last fall that there was an audience for such a magazine.

"I mean, he's sort of the target reader, Jay," Ms. Wintour said in her flower-laden office on the 12th floor of the Condé Nast building in Times Square. The target reader is a man over 35 who earns more than $100,000 a year, is already living the life he wants rather than merely chasing it, and presumably isn't too embarrassed to be seen reading a magazine that for more than a century has been associated with women.

"When people ask me, 'Who is this magazine for?' I say, 'Well, did you ever wonder who are the guys on the arms of the women who read Vogue?' " Thomas A. Florio, the publisher, said. Although the first issue is considered a trial until Mr. Newhouse gives the go-ahead for a second one (probably next April), Mr. Florio said it had the highest number of advertising pages (164) for a Condé Nast introduction, more than double what he expected.

The advertisers also reflect the editorial content, which is about lifestyle and accomplishment rather than trendy fashion and how to get a date. They include Hinckley yachts, Kiton suits and distillers of rare Scotch. Bergdorf Goodman and Barneys New York bought multipage spreads that emphasize their specialized brands, and, Mr. Florio said, Gucci agreed to shoot an advertisement that looked less "slick" than its usual campaigns.

Just who is on the arm of the Vogue reader represents, if nothing else, an interesting anthropological study of men and masculinity at the beginning of the 21st century.

The articles Mr. Fielden commissioned - a number of them from New Yorker writers like John Seabrook, Nick Paumgarten and Michael Specter - suggest a robust appetite for a literate, adventuresome life. There is a profile of the painter Walton Ford, who each summer takes a 250-mile walk from his New England front porch to his printer's; a feature called "Life Studies" that opens with a photographic portrait of John Currin in his TriBeCa studio; an article and fashion spreads about the English obsession with weekend shooting parties; a look at Roger Federer and the contents of his tennis bag; and a feature on the New York town house that the architect David Chipperfield designed for Nathaniel Rothschild. There are front-of-the-book pieces on wine, cellphones equipped with G.P.S. tracking systems and a quirky piece by Jeffrey Steingarten about his favorite meat slicer.

George Clooney is on the cover, photographed on the set of the Edward R. Morrow biopic he directed. And though there is plenty of fashion in the magazine, it takes a moment before you realize that it is all shown on so-called real men, not models.

It's hard to think of a contemporary magazine that is analogous to Men's Vogue. In a way, it's a paean to the urbanity of The New Yorker, the glamour of Vogue and the cosmopolitan sparkle of Esquire of the late 60's and early 70's before, it seems, the world was divided into gay and straight.

"I'm a guy who loves magazines," said Mr. Fielden, who was raised in San Antonio, where his father is a retired dentist and his mother teaches ballet. "I grew up reading them and would carry The New Yorker around like an acolyte, with my dictionary, when I was 15. Magazines were a connection to something a long way away. They were meaningful. It's eerie, half my life later, to be doing a magazine like this. You feel the momentum of where you came from and what you've been thinking for years and how it all starts to make some strange, interesting sense."

There has been a pronounced shift among men's magazines in recent years toward a younger, fashion-conscious consumer or, in the manner of titles like Maxim and FHM, toward the unabashed booze-and-broads genre. By 2003 FHM, Maxim and Stuff had acquired five million new readers, a gain that encouraged other magazines to tart up their content. "They were, in my opinion, being blinded by the success of Maxim," Mr. Florio said. "It was completely counterintuitive."

According to his analysis of the leading men's magazines, there has been a steady drop-off of readers over 35 in the last several years. But it's difficult to know if these readers left because of editorial content or if they were part of an overall retreat from print media.

Mr. Florio said he and Mr. Fielden found little resistance in focus groups to a men's magazine connected with Vogue. (Fifty-one percent of the participants said they would buy the magazine on the newsstand.) Despite the title Mr. Fielden and Ms. Wintour have not positioned Men's Vogue as a fashion magazine, or even as one with a conspicuous shopping angle.

Lee Eisenberg, the former editor of Esquire, sees shrewdness in their approach. He has not seen Men's Vogue, but based on a description of the contents, he said, of Mr. Fielden and Ms. Wintour: "They've obviously identified a demographic and a potential reader who's not being served by men's magazines. They also seem to realize they're not going to reach that guy through style." Mr. Eisenberg, who led Esquire at different times in the 70's and 80's and has just completed a book, added that he doubts that men in the targeted audience will have hang-ups about reading a woman's title. "I think we've passed that day and age," he said.

Still, Mr. Fielden is sensitive that some men might be self-conscious about reading Men's Vogue in the company, say, of their fellow commuters. "Well, men care," said Mr. Fielden, who is married and expecting his second child. "I'm no psychoanalyst, but I know that much. I felt, though, that I was in this unique position, being a guy with my background - raised in Texas, came to New York - to understand this feeling that men have about their masculinity and what they associate with a magazine like Vogue."

He seems eager that the magazine reflect a broad-gauged reader, whatever his sexual orientation. "I think this magazine is open to all readers, and that it doesn't try to stereotype or imagine what it is a person does in his private life."

Mr. Fielden, as many know, has an affinity for Saul Bellow, and he keeps on his desk a clipping of an obituary noting that that Nobel Prize-winner had flair and curiosity. "He's by no means the inspiration for this magazine," Mr. Fielden said, "but he's an iconic figure that lived a certain way, which is inspirational. And I think we all need a figure like that in our lives. And if a magazine can somehow reduce that into its pages, then that's something that can be compelling."