Suzy Menkes ought to stick to clothes

A ghastly page by Suzy Menkes in the IHT last Tuesday, with a number of fawning, poorly written celeb-based pieces ranging from 'cool artists' to some Greek princess and her extremely expensive clothes for children in Sloane Street.

I am a huge admirer of Suzy, but when she operates out of area (to use NATO parlance) it gets very messy.

Witness this from her, a piece in its conclusion completely at odds with two pieces by the IHT's and the NYT's art writers.

Frieze power: Art shakes up London society
By Suzy Menkes
Monday, October 20, 2008
LONDON: Where would you find a congregation of celebrities from Lily Allen through Kate Bosworth to Emma Watson? And fashion folk like Roland Mouret, Raf Simons or the milliner Philip Treacy? Not to mention cool artists like Tracey Emin and Grayson Perry, wearing a necklace of his alter-ego, Claire, dressed as Bo-Peep.
The latter names are the clue: It was last week's Frieze contemporary art fair in London that drew an international crowd and spawned a host of related events.
Such is the power of Frieze to pull in the hyper-hip and former super-rich that it has become a stronger magnet for the stylish than London Fashion Week.
Whether or not they were buying (count in the glam Moscow gallery owner Daria Zhukova, partner of the billionaire Roman Abramovich), Frieze has had an extraordinary impact on London society, making it the 21st-century version of the old guard's "Ascot" week and "the season."
Art folk did not just ricochet from Frieze to the spacious new Charles Saatchi gallery. They also went cool-hunting in the stores. Matthew Slotover, co-founder of the five-year-old fair in Regent's Park, said that Martin Margiela's London store was a must-see for all his arty visitors. Dover Street Market also says that it counts on Frieze for its best selling week of the year. Recession? The "R" word was replaced by the "F" word: Frieze.

At contemporary art sales, market stumbles on
By Souren Melikian
Monday, October 20, 2008
LONDON: The two-round match played out on the London auction scene this weekend left contemporary art badly bruised. Round One, fought at Sotheby's, revealed for the first time in years that all is not well in that field.
Sotheby's session on Friday night got off to a dashing start thanks to Oliver Barker, a "senior international specialist" and one of the most brilliant upcoming young auctioneers in London. Calling out bids at top speed, he managed to convey for a while the impression that raving buyers were scrambling on top of each other to put in bids.
Lot 1, "The Pink Tree" by John Currin, an oil on paper that could be a spoof of 16th century German painting, improbably doubled its estimate at £139,250, or $241,300. Next came Antony Gormley's "Domain LXIV," a construction of small stainless steel rods conjuring up the figure of a man standing. Like so much of contemporary art, it has a whiff of Dada, the art of the absurd invented a century ago by Marcel Duchamp as a slap in the face of the then-bourgeois establishment. Today's new establishment coughed up £193,250, well above the high estimate.
But an auctioneer's brio will take you just so far. By the time the third lot, Damien Hirst's "Beautiful Jaggy Snake Charity Painting" came up, enthusiasm was dying down. The 2007 Hirst, which resembles an enlarged close-up of traditional marbled paper painted in gaudy household gloss, sold with difficulty, under the low estimate, for £115,250.
That made the public uneasy. Howard Hodgkin's "Ekow," a kind of haphazard smear, dropped dead. Next, an abstract bronze and lacquer sculpture by Anish Kapoor also crashed. The failure of two works, both executed in 2008, did not augur well.
The sale became sticky. The first big lot, Andy Warhol's "skulls" of 1976, which reproduced 10 times in acrylic and silkscreen ink the image of a skull, very nearly failed and was retrieved by one £3.85 million bid, bringing the full price to £4.35 million, still far below the lowest expectations.
The second biggest lot, Gerhard Richter's "Abstract Picture (Red)," likewise sold by the skin of its teeth, for £2.84 million - one fifth less than the lowest price forecast by Sotheby's.
By the end of the sale, 27 percent of the works remained stranded. At the press conference held in a subdued atmosphere, a Sotheby's spokesperson revealed that the auction house had worked hard to persuade consignors to bring down their reserves. The house evidently succeeded to some extent - the six highest prices paid that evening were all well below the lower end of the estimate. All told, sales added up to £22 million. This was not a debacle, but undoubtedly a severe retreat.
As Christie's took over on Sunday afternoon in a leaden atmosphere, there were empty seats in the room.
In an eerie parallel to Sotheby's, the first three lots sold. Ron Arad's "London Parpadelle," a steel contraption which looked like a rug of steel mail unfolding and was No.6 in an edition of six, managed a generous £139,250. Takashi Murakami's composition "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," done in a futuristic comic strip style, then rose to £421,250, followed by Farhad Moshiri's "Golden Love Super Deluxe," a spoofy gilt wood cabinet filled with equally spoofy gilt porcelain and wooden pieces at £145,250.
At that point, the room lost interest. Andy Warhol's "Nine Multicolored Marilyns" dropped dead, and so did Jeff Koons's "Jim Beam-Log Car," a small stainless object produced in 1986 in an edition of three plus an artist proof. It matched its description but amused no one.
But Gilbert & George's set of 29 gelatin silver prints did. Titled "Muscadet," the set was "executed in 1973." Featured in many exhibitions, ranging from the Centre George Pompidou in Paris (1981) to the Hayward gallery in London (1987), it sold for £301,250.
Christie's, like Sotheby's, had persuaded some consignors to bring down their reserves, and that allowed the auctioneer to unload several heavyweights, all below the low reserve. A Lucio Fontana pulled through, on a single £8 million bid, missing the £10 million estimate quoted by Christie's "on request." But the oval piece of canvas, pierced with holes that give it the appearance of a moth-eaten doormat, was not cheap at £9 million, the price it cost with the sale charge.
Neither was the second most expensive painting, a realistic study of Bacon's face done more than 50 years ago by Lucian Freud. That realized £5.42 million, also less than the low estimate - but, again, a huge price.
By the auction's end, Christie's had sold 26 of 47 works for £32 million. The short message is that there is life left in the contemporary art market at 25 to 30 percent below current ambitions. That is very good in the current circumstances. Auction houses and their consigners had better heed the lesson.

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For the IHT, the most worrying bearish 2009 forecast I have seen

There has been no shortage of bearish 2009 advertising revenue forecasts. This one isn't new, but that it is carried by WWD touches upon one of the most important advertising categories for the International Herald Tribune - the fashion industry. To be read with alarm in some quarters I would think.

Question: Is Suzy Menkes Power recession proof? And what happens, if, when, she retires - where is the succession plan and what is it going to cost the IHT to make that hire?

S&P BEARISH ON PRINT ADS: Add Standard & Poor’s to the growing list of industry watchers down on print advertising, at least for now.
“High debt levels, migration of ad spending to the Internet, declining newsstand sales and mature industry growth prospects suggest a near-term decline in credit risk,” the ratings service said. S&P expects magazine ad pages to decline through the end of 2008, with “minimal benefit from election-year activity,” it said, adding, “The sector will face continued ad rate challenges, especially given pressure on circulation levels that publishers guarantee to advertisers.”
As for newspapers, S&P expects newspaper revenue and cash flow to continue to drop “at rates that accelerate each quarter.” “The pullback in advertising dollars has been so dramatic that publishers have struggled to adjust their cost structures,” the agency said. Five out of the nine rated newspaper companies are “CCC,” “signaling a near-term liquidity threat.”
The New York Times Co. was placed on CreditWatch in July after the company reported a drop in earnings before interest, taxes, appreciation and amortization of 36 percent for the second quarter, compared with the same period during the prior year.S&P expects the economic downturn will bottom out in early- to mid-2009 — although it doesn’t expect a pickup in activity until late 2009.
“As a result, we expect total ad spending to be minimally higher (0.9 percent) in 2009,” the report said. — Amy Wicks

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International Herald Tribune to Celebrate Suzy Menkes's Anniversary with a Museum Retrospective in Paris

Below, the press release from the NYT's about Suzy's party in Paris on Saturday.

If you were there, you're in, if not you're not.

NB

Note below how IHT tries to reference the IHT's longstanding relationship and coverage of fashion, before Suzy.

Why?

Suzy is a year or two off retirement and the big question is this: will the IHT retain all that fashion advertising if she goes. Actually, it's not certain Suzy would retire, she's under no obligation to, and certainly the IHT wouldn't want her to. That said, there is a succession issue of some importance to be considered.

What I find curious is how the NYT isn't leveraging Suzy more in their pages. I personally don't know the name of the NYT fashion editor nor what her influence is. To be followed....


The International Herald Tribune (IHT) will hold an exhibition to celebrate a milestone in the career of its world renowned fashion editor, Suzy Menkes. The exhibition entitled "Suzy at 20" will be held at the Galliera, Musee de la Mode de la Ville de Paris from September 28 to October 6, 2008. It will be free to the public.
"Suzy at 20" will be a retrospective of the high quality, international journalism Ms. Menkes has contributed to the IHT during the twenty years she has been fashion editor. It will give a flavor of the great diversity of her work, from her critique of the collections to her analysis of the trends in the global luxury goods industry. It will also cover Ms. Menkes's reviews of major cultural exhibitions.
The IHT has had links with fashion since the early 1890s when its first pages dedicated to fashion appeared. It has enjoyed the contributions of great fashion editors like Eugenia Sheppard and Hebe Dorsey, but during the past twenty years the quality and quantity of the IHT's international fashion coverage has increased beyond measure under Ms. Menkes's editorship.
Alongside her influential reporting and exclusive video interviews with fashion's movers and shakers on iht.com/style, Ms. Menkes created and hosts the IHT luxury conference series, a gathering of the top commercial and creative figures that is held annually throughout the world. This year's conference will be held in New Delhi, India in December.
Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, publisher of the IHT, said: "We hope that this exhibition marking Suzy's two decades at the IHT can pay some small homage to her great achievements. Her talent is rare and her contribution to the paper is enormous."
In recognition of her remarkable contributions to fashion journalism, Ms. Menkes was made a Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur in France in 2005. She then received the OBE - Officer of the Order of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth, about whom Ms. Menkes has written several books. The exhibition materials were printed by Hewlett-Packard.
NOTES TO EDITORS:
About the International Herald Tribune (www.iht.com)
The International Herald Tribune (IHT) is the premier international newspaper for opinion leaders and decision makers around the globe. It combines the extensive resources of its own correspondents with those of The New York Times, is printed at 35 sites throughout the world and is for sale in more than 180 countries. Based in Paris since 1887, the IHT is part of The New York Times Company.
About The New York Times Company
The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT), a leading media company with 2007 revenues of $3.2 billion, includes The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, 16 other daily newspapers, WQXR-FM and more than 50 Web sites, including NYTimes.com, Boston.com and About.com. The Company's core purpose is to enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment.





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Suzy Menkes' Trans-Atlantic appeal

Ahead of the the New York Fashion Week, The New York Daily News has published a list of New York's Fashion's 50 Most Powerful list.

What's striking is that there is no one from the New York Times, and no Suzy Menkes.

Suzy isn't based in New York, admittedly, but if the IHT is expected to make international stars of NYT columnists, it being the global edition of the NYT, the NYT isn't expected to make American stars of the IHT's columnists. One way traffic, clearly.

What's more, and this doesn't say much for the role of MSM print media, of the list's nine fashion media folk, the majority of them work in some type of digital fashion media.

Anyway, here they are:

1) Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.
6) IMG Fashion senior vice president Fern Mallis
9) Ruth Finley, who aged nearly 90 made her move from print to online and began posting her Fashion Calendar (publishing continuously since 1941!) online starting in June 2007.
12) People's Revolution founder Kelly Cutrone.
15) Candy Pratts Price, executive director of Style.com and winner of the Council of Fashion Designers of America's Eugenia Sheppard Award for excellence in journalism this year.
19) Fashion and celebrity photographer Patrick McMullan's Web administrator Candice McCarthy,
28) Brandusa Niro, editor-in-chief of The Daily
29) The Sartorialist, photographer and blogger Scott Schuman
39) Racked.com senior editor Leslie Price


You'd have to say the NYT is missing a bit of a trick here.




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The world post Suzy Menkes?

I'm not suggesting for one minute that Suzy Menkes is going to retire anytime soon, nor that she hasn't got many more years to go.

However, what is the post-Suzy strategy for the newspaper?

Without a shadow of a doubt she is the single biggest star journalist the IHT has (sorry Mr. Cohen) and she won't be around for ever. Which is a problem because no other journalist delivers more advertising dollars than her pages, year in, year out.

Here's a glimpse of the future, in an article from the NYT. I must check if the IHT has run it....

Not a word about Suzy.

Why the IHT hasn't done something similar online off the back of the Suzy brand name, while she is still with them, is beyond me.

Where the Fashionistas Go for a Quick Fix
Conceived to mimic mainstream glossies, titles like Hintmag.com, Fashion156.com and Glossmag.ca draw international readerships in the hundreds of thousands. But unlike their newsstand competitors, these publications exist exclusively online, updating weekly or even daily, and offering a sense of community that conventional monthlies cannot replicate. What they lack in tactile attraction, they make up for with a multimedia experience encompassing still photography, music, videos, blogs and message boards teeming with opinionated commentary. And if they are not about to slice into the profits of an Elle or a Vogue any time soon, the stars of the genre are luring advertisers, too.
In the current issue of Unvogue.com, a Webzine with a multiethnic following, readers can pore over pictures of athletic hipsters, natty on the tennis court in shorts and stiff-pressed blazers; they can read about novel ways to wear a vest; or “page” with a click to coverage of the antics of the tattooed late-night set.
Well-heeled fans of Luxuryculture.com, based in Paris, will encounter a multipage feature about Aurelie Bidermann, a jewelry designer whose silver-dipped lace collars and cuffs are sold at upscale stores. Fashion is part of a rarefied lineup that includes articles on the emergent art scene in Qatar and Abu Dhabi and a lavish pictorial on family safaris in Africa.
“People still like flipping a page and experiencing great photographs on paper,” said Imran Amed, the publisher of The Business of Fashion, a Web news site. But a Webzine, he said, “can be much more dynamic, change its content faster, create dialogue with a bunch of people passionate about the same topic, and push the envelope in getting them to interact.”
That speed of access and a clubby feeling give Webzines an edge with readers whose need to track down the latest cult jean or downtown boîte borders on compulsion. “These people are the influentials, and they have moved to the Internet,” said Samir Arora, the chief executive of Glam Media, which places advertising on glam.com, its aggregate of fashion and lifestyle sites. “Their tastes are redefining the future of fashion on the Web.”
The challenge for a Web magazine is to find ways of reaching them. Most online publishers are self-styled cyberfrontiersmen, struggling to differentiate their sites from the wilderness of chatty blogs, columns and newsletters, few of which have a distinct identity.
The fashion Webscape is “a very blurry world right now,” said Joe Mandese, the editor of MediaPost.com, an online business publication. “Everything is kind of a mash-up.” Sites and blogs, he said, are trying to incorporate the kinds of photography and video that have long been the province of print or TV. To stand out, a Webzine needs content that is memorable while sticking with a format that readers will find familiar.
“We wanted people to realize this is just like a fashion magazine,” said Lee Carter, the founder and editor of Hintmag.com.
Accordingly, Hint, which has, since its debut a decade ago, transformed itself from a gossip-laden Web site into a virtual glossy, is built on content that mirrors that of Nylon or W. Highlights in the current issue include a nine-page fashion feature that shows a Siouxsie Sioux imposter vamping moodily in a clothing and accessories by Martin Grant, Viktor & Rolf and others.
In a magazine-length interview, the graphic designer and branding guru Fabien Baron filled readers in on the “unspoken seduction that goes on in meeting Madonna for the first time.” A lightly macabre animated feature titled “Drawing Blood” showcases designs by Balenciaga and Comme des Garçons, set to the music of Munk and Annie.
Hint and other Webzines take their merchandising cues from print magazines, identifying the wares they feature with on-screen brand and store credits or links. A few have made shopping their primary focus. Net-a-Porter Notes (net-a-porter.com), a weekly catalog dressed up as a magazine, a kind of upscale Lucky, posts trend stories, including one in its July 30 issue that talks up new colors for fall. Readers can buy the berry-tone Phillip Lim dress on its pages by clicking directly on it.
The site Iconique.com shows off the work of new illustrators, stylists, photographers and a handful of fledgling designers. So does the London-based Fashion156.com, plucking new faces from design school obscurity. “The whole thrust of our magazine is to provide a platform for emerging talent,” said Guy Hipwell, the editor and founder.
In contrast to traditional magazines, which decide their content months before going to press, a Webzine can update almost instantly, Mr. Hipwell pointed out. “I can literally go to a graduate design show and get the work up on screen the next day.”
His 2-year-old site, published every 12 days and reaching an audience of about 250,000, was created for an estimated $40,000. Mr. Hipwell would not disclose his cost per issue, but acknowledged that he publishes on a shoestring, offering contributors nominal fees or prominent credits and Web links in exchange for work. He operates, of course, without the daunting overhead of real estate, printing and distribution costs.
Though sites like his are proliferating, they often vanish within weeks, which makes the number of online fashion magazines difficult to track. Some struggle for revenues, but a few are drawing blue chip advertisers, including Neiman Marcus, Tiffany and Lancôme. Advertisers can pay $10,000 to $50,000 to promote their products on a Webzine.
Some provide links to their Web sites; others a top-of-page banner or a “skin,” which takes over the white background of a Web page. Some provide a full-color interactive page masquerading as a fashion feature. In a recent edition of Net-a-Porter Notes, Aquascutum took the imaginative leap of inviting the viewers of its page to peek behind the scenes of its ad shoot by clicking to a video.
As Mr. Mandese and his peers point out, advertisers migrate to the Web because it can be cheaper and more cost effective. Gucci is paying $50,000 to be the exclusive sponsor of a three-month fall campaign on Hintmag.com. A single color page in a leading fashion glossy can cost $60,000 to $110,000.
Results of online advertising are also more readily measured. Sales and traffic can be tracked by reader click-throughs to marketers’ Web sites.
Advertising is often placed on a group of sites through increasingly powerful and competitive “vertical” networks like AdBrite, Adcision and Glam Media, a behemoth that operates more than 600 sites and has 77 million unique worldwide visitors a month, according to comScore Media Metrix.
“Arguably the networks represent the threat to print from online,” said Barry Parr, a media analyst with Forrester Research. But he added that for an advertiser, “there is nothing you can do on the Web that can substitute for the impact of an eight-page insert in the September Vogue.”
Others counter that Webzines are even now siphoning revenues from their print-world cousins. “The preponderance of ad spending is still in the traditional media,” Mr. Mandese said. But, he said, as marketers reach for Web audiences, which are widely perceived as hipper and more influential than those for print, “we are going to see a rationalization to shift money online just because it looks good.”
Many traditional magazines have struggled to find an online audience, often because their content so closely mimics the print and because they aim for the mainstream.
“Readers’ interests have becoming increasingly and deeply fragmented,” Mr. Arora said. To cater to those interests, Webzines are poaching print-world editors respected for their expertise in subjects that vary from models to designer mules.
“In the future there won’t be one all-powerful fashion editor — there will be many,” Mr. Arora said. “We are looking for the 20 new Anna Wintours.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/07/fashion/07ONLINE.html?_r=1&oref=slogin






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