Imitation, Inc

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, August 1, 2002 by Greg Lindsay

Byline: GREG LINDSAY

On a quiet street in the East Village, under a metal sidewalk grate lies the magazine industry's not-so-best-kept design secret: Gallagher Paper Collectibles. This store below the street houses a dizzying archive of vintage magazines - everything from 100-year-old Harper's Bazaars to a complete collection of Flair, a lushly produced magazine from the '50s. But the buzz about Gallagher's has less to do with the actual stash and more to do with who's been in to riffle through it. Considered the muse of the fashion and design worlds, this is the place to spend an afternoon if you're dying to get a read on the next big design trend, or if you just enjoy gossip about who's stealing what from whom.

So which magazine czars have been spotted there recently? Designer Raul Martinez (formerly of Vogue fame); ex-Mademoiselle editor Gabe Doppelt; fashion photographer Steven Meisel; Harper's Bazaar's creative director Stephen Gan; and Another Magazine's creative director Alex Wiederin. Word is they're buying lots of European men's and women's fashion magazines from the '60s - obscure titles such as Nova, Twen and Town. Real Simple's creative director Robert Newman also dropped by to pick up back issues of House and Garden and an array of women's service magazines from the '50s. Newman, like his peers, says he was shopping for inspiration. The seven sister's magazines from half a decade ago "have these huge, oversize lush drawings, as elegant as they could be," he says. "They really were escapism. To that extent, we try to copy that with Real Simple."

The design genius buried in Gallagher's stacks can often be rediscovered on today's magazine racks. But in this postmodern age, judicious recycling isn't about shameless copying. It's a knowing wink to pop culture or an honest homage to great magazine art directors from the past. It's about riffing off what's worked. And when you consider the incredible pressure on newsstand performance, it's easy to see why everyone from Vogue photographer Richard Avedon to Harper's Bazaar's ex-editor Kate Betts has sat in Gallagher's basement searching for layouts and logos that once reigned at the newsstand.

"Why not reinvent what was beautiful?" asks the store's owner, Mike Gallagher. "Why not look back at something brilliant and put a twist on it?" A 41-year-old, garrulous, charming and very well-connected former child actor, Gallagher founded his business in 1990 when he realized he could make a living selling old issues of fashion classics. In this dank retail shop, a 1960s Vogue goes for $75 and a copy of Twen will cost you $125. One year, fashion designer Donna Karan dropped $150,000 on what amounts to old newsprint.

Gallagher's encyclopedic knowledge of his inventory has made him a valuable asset to the fashion world's monied and fabulously chic. His elite clientele of fashion designers, such as Karan, Marc Jacobs and Anna Sui, make sure he has a front row seat to their shows. He's on the guest list of the best parties in and out of town. (He was recently invited to a soiree in Paris thrown by American Vogue creative director Grace Coddington.) Gallagher reveres his customers and as such Carrie Donovan, once an editor for the New York Times Magazine and Vogue, bequeathed to the collector 1,100 documents from her personal archives before she died last year. "Half that went straight into my personal library," Gallagher says. The rest was scattered around his subterranean maze of musty photography books and magazines.

A shameless name-dropper, Gallagher loves to let you know who he knows, and isn't shy about telling tales, especially if they're about him. He describes the time one budding fashionista met him at the Paris shows, and stared blankly, having never heard of his store. Fashion journalist Tim Blanks rescued him when upon spotting him began yelling, "Gallagher's! My favorite store!" "Then some guy from Bergdorf's started saying the same thing. Then somebody else," Gallagher says. Fashion's corporate players certainly know who he is: The fashion conglomerate LVMH recently made Gallagher a seven-figure offer for the entire store. He turned it down.

But the role he most relishes is historian. Gallagher can trace the lineage of the most obscure design trends, and he takes pride in connecting the past with the present. "I went in there once," Gan says, "and [Gallagher] said, 'I heard you're doing Bazaar now - let me show you the magazine where Kate Betts' logo came from.'"

Gallagher, like most students of magazine design, knows that Harper's Bazaar has a long history of borrowing from the past - mainly its own. When Liz Tilberis took over in 1992, she brought with her creative director Fabien Baron. In an effort to restore the magazine to its former glory, Baron looked back to the techniques of famed art director Alexey Brodovitch, who steered the title's creative direction from the '30s through the '50s. Baron commissioned a modern updating of the title's signature logo, reconstructed a modernized version of Didot typeface, and drew upon Brodovitch's designs to give his own work continuity while dragging it into the '90s.