A copy arrived on my desk last week, and if you brave the lines at one of the hand-selected bookstores carrying the magazine, you’ll see that, yes, it works. Peel has honed Chanel’s vast resources to make a good art magazine. (That may sound simple, but I can assure you, it’s not.) It’s 300 pages; there’s a lot of art and no filler. The C-on-both-sides logo appears on the spine, but the brand’s name doesn’t appear on the cover.
In lieu of any ads—apart from, you know, the obvious one—there are pages given over to the bookstores, museum shops, and magazine racks that will stock the copies: Bananafish in Shanghai, Bookstore Walther König at the Hamburger Bahnhof, McNally Jackson. The page for Reference Point, Jonah Freud’s very chic London library, does not list the name of Freud’s establishment and reads simply, “got books? we do.”
“It’s going to be really beautiful, and it’s not going to be cannibalizing anything that’s happening in the magazine space because it will be free,” Peel said. “It will have no advertising, which is very counter-normative. And we will give free space to the best bookstores in the world and then ask them to share it with whoever they think is appropriate.”
There are original lyrics by our dinnermate Patti Smith. Andrew Durbin goes long on Peggy Guggenheim. Lisa Immordino Vreeland writes about Jean Cocteau. A recurring feature isolates text messages with artists—Alvaro Barrington, Nairy Baghramian, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Adam Pendleton, Rachel Rose, Sung Tieu, and the architect Kulapat Yantrasast—and asks them all the prompt “I wish I knew more about…” And the big portfolio is all new work by Sherman.
It’s no secret that a fashion brand is fronting this whole thing. This is clearly a Chanel magazine—though the company still insists it’s not about Chanel.
