MAGCULTURE.COM / BLOG

Love story

After all the speculation and PDF images, at last we have the real thing. Love is in the shops, and here it is in all it’s 334 page, 15mm-deep glossiness.

First impressions count, and that cover is spectacular. The colours, the styling, the overall detailing is everything you’d expect from what is basically the old Pop team. The brush-stroke coverlines contrast pleasingly with the engraved logo and the reds and pinks combine well with the powder blue background. Of course the naked Beth Ditto shot has been tried before, as pointed out here last week (and the NME press office have been busy highlighting the link too) but that’s an easy distraction. On a major launch like this you’d expect something more original, sure, but that NME portrait was so rough, so under-styled, that even if the Love team were aware of it they must have thought ‘we can do better’. Which, frankly, they have.

A great first impression, then, but what do we get when we open the magazine?

Graphically, the issue continues with the brush stroke/classical type contrast seen on the front cover, all rendered in calm monochrome throughout. Creative directors Lee Swillingham and Stuart Spalding have been looking at post-second world war design, the period when the austerity of the war years was beginning to fade away in preperation for the sixties. The use of drop capitals, headings and para indents give a convincigly fifties feel throughout, perhaps chanelled through Blitz and other eighties titles, with only the fashion styling (and nipple count) giving away the magazine’s newness.

Many will question the use of the word ‘newness’. For there is little in the content that is truly new. Love is all about photography and image, but it reels out the same old photographers, celebs and stories. Courtney Love? Peaches Geldof? Iggy Pop (whose iconic status surely ceased with his recent TV ad campiagn for car insurance)? Who cares about these people? And much as I enjoy Kate Moss’ breasts, they’ve almost taken on their own celebrity identity now. Enough!

Although prepared and presented to the high level expected of it’s creators, in the end Love is a flick-book of rather jaded ideas. There is barely any written content – one of the longer pieces being editor Katie Grand’s intro letter, above – so the reader jumps from shoot to shoot with little change of pace or relief.

So what’s the big deal?

Bringing the Pop idea into Condé Nast was a brave move, and, despite everything above, there is something fascinating about seeing this magazine come from within that most staid of publishers. I can only imagine the culture shock – as a previous commenter here asked, how did MD Nichoas Coleridge explain the launch cover to his US colleagues?

It feels to me that Love is trying to straddle two distinct roles. Firstly, it wants to continue where Pop left off as the journal of record for the in-crowd fashion world. This world has stagnated for a while now, and that’s reflected in this launch issue. But until the recession gets so bad that even the likes of Prada collapse, this world is a must for all the major fashion brands to be involved with. And what better way to join in than advertise in Love? Kerchiiiing!

Secondly, via Condé Nast, Pop/Love wants to reach a bigger audience. Not massive, but bigger. Condé Nast have a host of relatively low-selling but high-quality magazines. If it’s men’s title GQ is all about great writing, at least in terms of boasting a spectacular list of regular contributors, then Love can do a similar thing in terms of photography. In return it fills an otherwise empty space in Condé Nast’s portfolio of titles. Having never got down and dirty with an out-and-out celebrity title, Love provides an appropriately nuanced link with that market for Condé Nast. In an interesting inversion of the normal media-celebrity relationship, I can see the famous queueing up to be featured in Love rather than being courted and paid by Hello! to appear.

Perhaps, though, the main story here is the scarcity of big new magazine launches, and the realisation that not only has there not been a launch of this scale for some time, but that there is unlikely to be another this year.