Fabien Baron: One man renaissance text (part I)

Graphis, Mar/Apr 2003 by Coupland, Ken

The Midas Touch

No one man in the media design business is more powerful and influential than Fabien Baron today. He has orchestrated spectacularly successful advertising campaigns for an international design posse that includes fashion honchos (and honchas) Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Giorgio Armani, Jil Sander, Burberry, Issey Miyake, Carolina Herrera and hotelier Ian Schrager. Most memorably, he has revitalized magazine designs for Harper's Bazaar, Interview, and Italian Vogue, to name some of the more prominent beneficiaries of the legendary Baron touch.

In fact, though he calls his agency Baron & Baron-when there is, in fact, only one Baron involved-it might be more appropriate to belabor the conceit and call his outfit Baron & Baron & Baron & Baron. The 43-year-old Frenchman has proved equally adept at fragrance packaging (for cK one), music videos (for Madonna), fashion photography and most recently, furniture and accessories (his eponymous line for the upscale Italian manufacturer Cappellini).

He could aptly be called a Renaissance man. "People have too much of a tendency to be put in that little box that has been assigned to them." Baron regrets, speaking from the offices in Manhattan he designed for himself and a bare-bones staff of 25. Pegged as a brilliant and innovative editorial art director early in his 20-year career, Baron has refused to be pigeonholed. "It's the point of view that matters in the end." Baron's signature embodies his point of view: stripped-down but savvy, classical but contemporary, tasteful but somehow borderline outrageous.

Baron is a Renaissance man in the literal sense of the term, too: he exemplifies rebirth. His overarching strategy is not to invent from the ground up, but to reinvent. His talent lies in being able to take some fabulous invalid-Calvin Klein's near-bankrupt label, Conde Nast's second-tier Harper's Bazaar, Burberry's all-but-defunct clothing line-and administer the tonic that spurs its recuperation.

Burberry, the once-stodgy British raincoat manufacturer, has blossomed under a Baron-directed ad campaign into a spectrum of successful products for all ages branded with the company's distinctive plaid. "He's direct, to the point, and very efficient in the way he works," Burberry CEO Rose Marie Bravo observes. "He's not one of those people who procrastinates. He gets it done right on the spot and moves on to the many other projects he's involved in."

Baron's take-charge approach has been apparent from the earliest beginnings of his career. Ink was already in his blood. His father was art director for Liberation (at the age of 12, Baron was peddling subscriptions of the left-wing daily door to door).

Design that's more than skin-deep

Baron first arrived in the U.S. in the early '80s. With poor language skills (he maintains he spoke virtually no English), and no one in the business he actually knew, the designer (then a mere 22) found himself adrift. New York in those days was a very different place than its present-day, buffed-up, sanitized reality. Crime-ridden and filthy, the city at the time was an intimidating place for a Parisian used to the relatively pristine conditions of a European capital. Yet Baron was stimulated. "It was very exciting, having that element of danger," he recalls. he explored the streets of SoHo and a then-deserted TriBeCa for days on end, soaking up gallery shows.

Oddly enough-he can't even explain why-Baron, in his first few days in the country, met with luminaries like Alex Liberman, who was then in the process of transforming Vanity Fair. Living in relative isolation in a pre-gentrification loft in the South Street Seaport, Baron took on any freelance assignment he could find.

The lone ranger

In a surprisingly quick ascension, and with a few disagreements riddling his path, he went on to his first regular gig designing Self. He then landed at GQ and eventually moved to New York Woman (later picked up by American Express), but disagreements with the publisher over where the magazine was headed prompted his departure. Baron then began a rapid rise in the New York magazine world that he's convinced took place because he was perceived as a designer who understood information and how to structure it. "My experience was in newspapers, so I already had a journalism background," he says now. "I was passionate about the beauty of design but I was also passionate about writing, which is necessary if you're working on a magazine. It's not good to only do pretty things."

Baron wasn't about to tackle a magazine he felt he couldn't reinvent. He remembers turning down, in the space of several weeks, offers to revamp both the French and American editions of Vogue. "I was sitting in my loft saying, 'How crazy, how stupid of me, I just said no to two Vogues,'" he laughs. "But I knew I couldn't do a proper job because I wouldn't have my freedom."

Baron allows that he was heavily influenced in his youth by French Vogue, particularly the work of risk-taking photographers Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton. "These were my heroes before I left for New York," he says. Once established in the U.S., Baron quickly went to work emulating his icons by importing young, relatively untried European lensmen in a wildly popular ad campaign for Barney's, the Manhattan clothing store. Beginning in 1988 with Patrick Demarchelier and Peter Lindbergh, Baron soon added younger talents to his stable, including edgy "stylists" like David Sims and Mario Sorrenti.