I will be the first to admit that as much as I know how dumb Wallpaper* magazine is, I'm very much seduced by it. In fact, I used to buy it regularly until I realized I was buying into a reading about a lifestyle I'd so covet but almost never achieve. I also went through the last three issues I had bought and realized that not one single person of color was in the entire magazine. (and the magazine is pretty damn thick). Not in any of the ads, not in any of the articles, not even when they were in Africa.
Although it markets itself as such, Wallpaper is not a magazine. It is a surreal lifestyle brand. A superb example of “brand concepting". There's an idea, a blueprint, to capture, mold, and sustain a global / jet-set / ‘metrosexual’ culture that only the Wallpaper brand (and the people who buy the magazine) understands. It makes for great eye candy but is of little practical use. Their aspirational "global citizen" lifestyle, living through one impeccably styled rail hub or departure lounge after the other, looks great on glossy paper but is basically a hollow fantasy. One simply cannot deny the attraction holds for young professionals like myself, and mockingly it assumes we are from the demographic they imagine would be buying the magazine. We are at the point where we make eno! ugh money to take the occasional international trip, yet are forced to fly coach, stay at a 2 star hotel and eat at cheap cafes. The idea that we could take that same trip, fly first class, stay at a five star hotel, eat at the finest restaurants, pick up a hand-carved ivory Buddah to take back to the house, and charter a private helicopter ride around the island just for kicks doesn’t seem THAT far out of reach.
It truly is a mirage of something so close but yet so far away. By presenting obscure CD’s you’ll never be able to find by groups you’ve never heard of, there is the impression that there are things in this magazine that will allow you to be a part of this ‘pseudo-fashionable’ world. Then you go and search for the CD, and when you find it, you somehow have access to something that no one else knows about, which is intriguing to me personally, in itself. They also appear to have an editorial purpose beyond promoting slick consumer goods, with a progressive/ecological ideological slant--the extensive articles on the Red Cross and the UN, for example, or the fact that automotive news/stories tend to be about small, efficient urban vehicles--even bicycles!--and not expensive sports cars. Somehow it makes you feel like you are i! ndeed a part of the world they have created.
Also, the appearance of both men *and* women on every cover, instead of the usual sexpot selling model, as well as the gay-friendly inferences (which somehow make the heterosexual reader feel as if they are now more open because this stylistic photo doesn’t freak them out) somehow gives the reader a sense of political correctedness. The sexiness of all the women, like the completely sheer shirt wearing female with no bra (hard nipples and all) or the ‘uni-sex’ nature of all the men’s clothes present a world where sexuality is something that is free of boundaries or restraints. (Did I mention the models are drinking a glass of a vintage 1894 reserve port at $9,000 a bottle out of hand blown Finnish stemware at $4,000 per glass!)
When the magazine started to become popular, many remarked how the presentation of the graphics in the magazine are so "my generation". And it was quite a big deal, seeing as how excellent the magazine design is. In the end though, the magazine is just one big infomercial, the crux of emptiness. And after you’ve looked through the whole thing once, you feel underachieved, unaccomplished, and feel like either your goals were too low, or your achievements not important enough. One should give credit to the concept of making us spend money on basic advertising though………….. interesting phenomenon really…...
And yes, the mix of "quiet" architecture, unpublished destinations, the love for everything Swiss, environmental conscience and high-style, low-profile living makes for a great contemporary fantasy. Also do u notice in the writing they always make these grandiose assumptions along the lines of "oh, of course you have this, of course you are this way, of course you’ve been there.... "
Its like you’re reading this issue while lounging in your Eames chase lounge chair, wearing your Prada clothes and your Louis Vuitton shoes while living in your Scandinavian designed villa in the Swiss alps…. Its so wonderfully silly.
BUT, they give extensive coverage of new & young architects and designers (I've learned about many lesser-known architects here that get little press anywhere else), and they champion unknown glo! bal modernism, with interesting historical articles on mid-century masterpieces in the middle east, Africa, South America, that I've never seen covered elsewhere. However, even in Africa, there won’t be any colored people in the photos, as if it infers: when you go to this obscure location of the world, you’ll be in your 5 star hotel and driven to this location thus you won’t have to deal with any of the local people. I hate it.
As eye-candy alone, it's great. It's well designed. Their photo layouts are more carefully shot than most, and but for products, interiors, etc, they do a nice job of always integrating lifestyle components (interiors, products, fashion, art, antiques), instead of just arraying a half-dozen handbags against a cheap backdrop and calling it a spread. For fashion alone though, it makes you feel like if you were to copy the styles that are presented, you’ll ! only have a knock-off of the original presented here;
The magazine is all about irony...the only person who actually lives that lifestyle is probably the editor. The magazine is so ridiculous and pretentious that it can’t be taken as literal...and the editors must know this...so I try not to take the magazine so seriously – I take for what it is: eye candy. It is actually quite funny if you read between the lines. I think the only people who actually try to live that way are people without any real style or design sense of their own and so they have to look to a magazine to get it.
In an age of "I don’t care what he said, that just looks COOL", can we blame wallpaper? Lets be honest, most magazines suck. I don’t support the whole jet-set, style over substance approach at all, (maybe because I’m not a part of it) and it seems to me, until architects start taking this profession seriously, we're all doomed to more fluff and its consequences. Or all the fluff will continue encouraging architects to produce boring bland buildings as an antithesis to all of the fluff.
Wallpaper is very easy to dismiss as just improbably stylish lifestyle porn, but that would be ignoring its true genius (that is, if you get beyond it’s tongue-in-cheek arrogance).
Wallpaper teaches the reader and fellow magazines the lost art of laughing at one's self.
The genius is in the irony, and its lure is the impossibility of it all. It is a very well laid out, beautiful magazine that mocks its readers because no-one of us is so beautiful, so stylish, so Scandinavian, so unemotional and pansexual, so rich and sophisticated, with so much leisure time and, God forbid, no children or ugly/poor/unfashionable friends. We can be some of these things, but never all of them. The message is "Everything in this magazine is way too much for you", and it is sent in a very intelligent way.
So if you’ve never purchased the magazine, I do encourage you to go and buy one issue so you can see what I’m talking about to experience how easy it is to be swept into this Utopia of sorts that they’ve created. Everything is happy, beautiful, and there aren’t any colored people around either! If you’ve bought it before, then you understand how as much as I hate it, I can’t wait for the next issue to come out!
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