Fabien Baron

So Linear. Eugeniy: Major PH Fabien Baron for Interview June/July 11

Young Mr Wang, a businessman marked with an innocuous beauty and that proverbial steel trap mind : Image via The Selby

I spent the weekend immersed in Industrie magazine, shocked as to how dense with stimulating information this second issue is.

Young photographers on the scene breathe a sigh of relief. There is hope for you yet.

To say it was unexpected is beyond understatement but the sudden decision of Fabien Baron and Karl Templer to depart the freshly revamped Interview mag, certainly had The Hiss Squad hissing overtime this weekend.

Kate Moss/IMG PH: Mert n Marcus for Interview Sept 2008 via tfs

“It’s time for a magazine to have well-executed visuals to counterbalance the culture of point-and-shoot "...“Quality needs to be put into magazines today, otherwise there will be no reason for magazines to exist.”

Fabien Baron in WWD on the new Interview

Lou Doillon by Terry Richardson for Interview August 08 via hintmag.com

Fabien Baron: Today one jumps between the worlds of art, fashion and entertainment all the time. Designers hire artists to work on their products, while artists want fashion people to be interested in their work, and they both care about fame the way Hollywood cares about fame. Where before these fields were very elitist, today they spread out everywhere. They're interacting more than ever, overlapping and becoming almost one. Interview will represent that. We can make a special fashion issue and be believable, or make a special art issue and be believable, or do entertainment.

Lee Carter: It seems like that's what Andy would've wanted.

Fabien Baron: And it's what he did very well. He was able to mix glamorous and trendy on the same page, to show the worlds together as one. We can be the ambassadors of this vision.

Lee Carter :A big swirl.

Eva Mendes:Mikael Jansson: Interview August 2008: via tfs

Arena Homme Plus Signature Font

Stylists: The Interpreters Of Fashion: Rizzoli 2007

The talk this week? Rachel Zoe's bold claim about possibly being more influential than Anna Wintour. The cabal is in a frenzy at this sacrilege. Its the best fashion sound byte since “We don't get out of bed for less than 10,000 a day” But given the high altitude Rachel now lives at (and the corresponding lack of oxygen) Rachel Zoe is entitled to be as megalomaniac as she wants to be. I mean maybe she means more influential in malls...or more influential with the 18 and unders. There is even a rumor in circulation that Zoe has first pull at Calvin. A rumor probably...possibly started by the Zoe camp. But it gets you thinking. Whose eyes, tastes, preferences inform the idea of what is fashion now? And how does the tastes and preferences (and talent) of these forces affect how fashionable women dress? . I spent my entire Saturday ringing up some kids in the trade to form an informal style council. Not only was Wintour with her fashion funds, speed dial to billionaire CEO's and Met Costume Balls PR machines in another universe of influence, the conclusion was there were easily 5 forces in the world of styling who could eat Zoe for lunch...and use her ribcage as toothpicks.

THE FIVE:
Grace Coddington:

Some of Marc Atlan's Greatest Hits

From I-phones to limited edition Nikes, why has design become this much of a market force? Is it that we're experiencing an on-going visual evolution of contemporary culture in the same way we are under-going a technological revolution? I'm not trying to write a master's thesis. (Part of the discipline of The Imagist for me is to learn to be...succinct). I'm just trying to figure out how the hell the whole world got to be so design sensitive. When did American product packaging start to overwhelm its content? To personalize the issue a little bit... I was out out to dinner last night with a pal from an ad agency, when the subject turned to Fabien Baron and his powerhouse agency Baron and Baron. Its not a company anymore it seems.Its a brand in itself, if you'll pardon that dirty word..."brand".

Baron you know from the firm's traditional image management of magazines : Paris Vogue, the 90's Harper's Bazaar- which obviously I've been looking at a LOT- Interview magazine, Arena Homme +, as well as fashion ads -most notably Calvin Klein. We gossiped a little bit about the influence Le Baron and Karl Templer now had over the direction of Calvin, down to the models, in which that team seems not to be as personally invested in. Certainly not the way Calvin the man invested in Kate Moss and Brooke Shields and now no girl or boy for Calvin is allowed to be a bigger story than the clothes.