How Details magazine turned me into a rebel consumer

Washington Monthly, April, 1994 by Keith White

I wanted to be a Details man. I had recognized my need for bee-stung lips, carefully unkempt hair, a washboard stomach, baggy Versace suits, tattoos--you get the picture. 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. I couldn't get what I needed from stodgy old Esquire or pretty-boy GQ. 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 trio of British men's fashion mags (The Face, Arena, and Sky) were simply too expensive and too derivative for my tastes. Details, with its $2 cover price and its relentlessly macho attitude, promised to deliver the new me.

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. And like Pearl Jam, Details knows how to translate nonconformity into sales. 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.

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. 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. 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.

Not that catering to the needs of the status-anxious is anything new. We Americans, as the Monthly has argued in the past, have long looked to magazines to guide us through the dizzying array of consumer choices. The roots of this tendency, indeed the roots of Details' beguiling come-on, are easily traced to the years immediately following World War II. 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. When anyone could earn a sheepskin, how were you supposed to prove your refinement? And with so many parvenus blessed with large discretionary incomes, how were you supposed to distinguish yourself from others in the newly monied masses?

A one word solution was discovered: Taste. As members of the new middle class scrambled to improve their social standing, they were eager to adopt the accouterments of their social betters. But while spending and acquiring increasingly became sanctioned ends in themselves, questions remained about how to assess individual performance in the new taste wars. 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. That's where magazines came in; many publications proved happy to play the role of discriminating doyenne.

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. The New Yorker, after all, catered to the over-30 crowd, not generally the sort insecure enough about themselves to be easy marks. (Details wisely targets the more insecure pre- and post-college types.) But the magazine knew its craft. 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. And, helpfully, the products pushed--swishy liqueurs, silk ties--were tantalizingly affordable. Just about anyone could save up and buy a seersucker suit from Brooks Brothers, if only once a year. In effect, The New Yorker traded on its literary cachet to play arbiter in the evermore convoluted status game. 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.

Yet as the process of acquiring status became more complicated, readers sought more explicit instruction in the art of the buy. 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. With king-of-the-mountain bravado, Felker signaled his own magazine's arrival with fillips at the fusty, passe New Yorker. 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. Even as it asserted its bona tides, New York promised to offer more and clearer signals about how to consume. 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.