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Elle Has a Little Work Done
Joe Zee, left, Elle’s new creative director, with Roberta Myers, right, at a fashion shoot with the actress Sienna Miller.By ERIC WILSON
THE most glamorous thing about the offices of Elle magazine is that they have an excellent view of Condé Nast, eight blocks to the south, where Vogue and GQ and Vanity Fair exist in movie-set-worthy splendor and Town Cars idle in perpetuity. Roberta Myers, the editor of Elle, wears Prada, but she takes the subway to work.
Her corner office on the 44th floor of Paramount Plaza is populated by secondhand leather couches and silver floor lamps, a dark void at the end of a long, drab hallway lined with faded covers of issues past. And yet the threadbare offices of Elle appear less desperately in need of an update than the face of the magazine itself. Like Ms. Myers’s office, Elle is in transition, itself the subject of a makeover not unlike those ducklings-turned-swans featured in the magazine.
To the fashion world, Elle’s visual identity has become predictable to the point of redundancy, losing the spunk of its early years. The imagery of sexy, confident women posing in desert oases against impossibly blue skies seemed to give way to the personal swimsuit fetishes of its longtime creative director, Gilles Bensimon.
Mr. Bensimon, according to those who worked with him, demanded unusual control over every image — the clothes, the hair, the models — appearing in the magazine. For years, he personally photographed most of the fashion features.
“I don’t think that was only perception, as anyone who looked at the magazine could see,” Ms. Myers, 45, said. “Fashion is about image. It’s a story that you have to tell visually, and you cannot do that in only one voice.”
It was not until the end of last year that Mr. Bensimon, 63, began to concede space to outside photographers and stylists, leading to a redesign of the magazine by Joe Zee, its new creative director, who was imported from Condé Nast in January. The new look Mr. Zee has been developing will be fully unveiled in the September issue, which goes out to subscribers next week. Elle is already generating controversy (or buzz, depending on your view) for putting the troubled actress Lindsay Lohan on the cover.
“It is a big change,” said Mr. Bensimon, who in an interview late Monday night brushed aside persistent reports of his resistance to the changes. He will continue to photograph Elle’s covers and some features for its 39 international editions, but his title is now international creative director and his name has moved from the top of the masthead to the bottom.
“For me it is a positive,” Mr. Bensimon said, before turning philosophical. “What can you do if you are always thinking that it was better before? Let’s think about tomorrow.”
Since Mr. Zee, 38, the former fashion director of W and editor of the short-lived Vitals shopping magazine, took over, there have been indications that Elle intends to become a more provocative read.
Ms. Myers and Mr. Zee chose Ms. Lohan for the September cover in the spring. Days after the actress was interviewed and photographed, paparazzi shot her passed out in a car over Memorial Day weekend, and she entered rehab for the second time in six months. The magazine decided to leave her on the cover. She appears in a Venus pose, pulling up the hem of a violet Donna Karan dress. A quotation from her says, “I’m glad I went to rehab — I needed to get away from everyone and I didn’t know how.”
The image — with the actress’s words — was shipped to the printer before Ms. Lohan’s latest arrest last week on charges that included driving under the influence and cocaine possession. It is a turn of events that may render the cover bizarrely ironic.
THAT is not the only controversy Ms. Myers must contend with. In Elle’s transition to a post-Gilles Bensimon era, it has been plagued by reports of budget cuts, canceled trips for editors to the couture shows in Paris and reduced access to car services.
Twenty of its 59 editorial staff members and freelancers on the masthead have departed this year, according to a count by Jennifer Gerson, Ms. Myers’s former assistant, who is now blogging on the Web site Jezebel.com. These include two of the magazine’s most recognizable faces — Isabel Dupré, its style director, and Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, the fashion editor-at-large.
A staff member who remains at Elle said the senior employees who departed were loyal to Mr. Bensimon. “They banded themselves together as a way to survive, until the ship went down,” said the person, who requested anonymity because employees are not permitted to speak about personnel matters.
Ms. Myers, for her part, did not deny the number of departures but declined to comment on particular employees. She said the magazine’s parent company, Hachette Filipacchi Media, continued to invest in Elle and that any financial cutbacks resulted from routine reviews of budgets.
Nevertheless, Elle has an image problem in the fashion industry. Although its newsstand sales have shown healthy gains for the last three years, it has settled into third place among its American competitors, trailing in total ad pages for the year behind Vogue and In Style. “Vogue represents the ideal of fashion,” said Italo Zucchelli, the men’s designer for Calvin Klein. “Elle is for real people. It does its job, but I never read it.”
For years before its redesign, Elle had been consistent, popular with readers but relatively ignored by fashion insiders. Carol A. Smith, group publishing director, conceded that the magazine lacked excitement. “Some people felt it had gotten sleepy,” she said. “It wasn’t that at all. People weren’t talking about it.”
On the wall behind Ms. Myers’s desk there is a poster created by Paul Ritter, Mr. Zee’s collaborator since Vitals and now the design director of Elle, with words underlined in what appears to be pink lipstick: “Energy! Sexy! Fun! Smart!” This is the mission statement for Elle, Ms. Myers said, intended to encapsulate both its visual and editorial tone in the redesign, which is most dramatic in the injection into the 592-page issue of arresting work by young photographers like Tom Munro, Matthias Vriens, Doug Inglish and Todd Cole. Lori Goldstein, the stylist, is in talks to work for the magazine.
The September issue includes a new column by Nina Garcia, the fashion director whose manicured claws appear on “Project Runway,” and some intriguing articles, notably Megan Deem’s critical report on Myfreeimplants.com, a Web site that connects women with men who would like to sponsor their breast implants. Yet other articles seem to exist as quid pro quo to advertisers, like a profile of Kate Winslet on the occasion of her endorsement deal with Lancôme, or the requisite 40th anniversary tribute to Ralph Lauren.
Of course, none of this will draw more attention to Elle than Ms. Lohan, who is shown in fashion photographs by Mr. Bensimon, his sole contribution to the issue, and a story by Holly Millea that conveys Ms. Lohan’s rampant narcissism. Ms. Myers insisted the choice was never in doubt. The September 2006 cover of Elle with Ms. Lohan was the best seller of the year, and readers would undoubtedly be more interested in the actress after the scandal. Unfortunately, Ms. Myers chose a subject who refuses to behave according to production schedules.
“Lindsay Lohan is a potential embarrassment for them,” said Steven Cohn, the editor of Media Industry Newsletter. “I would think she is just about worthless as a marketing tool.”
On July 24, the day Ms. Lohan was arrested, Ms. Myers and Mr. Zee were in a photo studio in Chelsea, working on a feature about personal style for the October issue that would include portraits of several stylish individuals, including the actress Sienna Miller and her sister, Savannah, who were posing madly for the photographer, Alexei Hay.
“Move your arms like a sorceress,” Mr. Hay commanded.
No one seemed disturbed by the news about Ms. Lohan or how the issue would be received.
“Read the story, look at the treatment, and then we can talk about it,” Ms. Myers said. “I think it’s a piece of journalism.”
But wasn’t Ms. Myers disappointed?
“We still think the story as written gives insight to her situation right now,” she said.
Mr. Zee said that Ms. Lohan and her peers, in spite of their behavior, have had a meaningful impact on fashion, pointing to trends that originated with the Olsen twins, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. Elle addresses this paradox with a fashion story that looks as if it was ripped from the pages of Star magazine, with a model dressed in designer clothes to look as if she were caught by paparazzi while taking out the garbage in a Versace bathrobe or awkwardly adjusting a Chanel bikini. (It is similar to a feature by Steven Meisel in the January 2005 issue of Italian Vogue.)
“Yes we have Lindsay on the cover and she looks beautiful and she’s a fashion girl, but I didn’t want people to think we’re also not aware of what people perceive Lindsay to be,” Mr. Zee said.
Mr. Zee grew up in Toronto reading fashion magazines in high school, and as a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, he redesigned the school newspaper. He can distinctly remember a cover of Elle with the model Ashley Richardson in red. “It was fresh and vibrant,” Mr. Zee said. “It was young and sexy. It was just bold and in your face. That was the part I always remembered.”
Asked about his vision for Elle, the words were repeated in energetic bursts: “I would love to see a girl walking down the street and be dressed like our pages, and for someone to look at her and say: ‘Oh my God. She is so Elle.’ ”
Mr. Bensimon is less emotive about the future of Elle, although he said he planned to continue to be a part of it.
“I think it is not safe to tell them what to do,” he said. “A photographer is better behind the camera, not in front. And I would like to take pictures until the last day of my life, even if it is of my own foot.”
