The death knell of print has been sounded on several occasions over the past decade. Yet as more and more publications see the light of day, those who predicted its very death become more and more shrill. Sometimes, the persistence of print becomes an affront. Too often, though, this affront is a mere poke in the side – in the form of niche publications – and not the desired blow to the body it could (and should) be. Scale is something we should be afraid of, but something we should embrace. And every so often, a publication comes along and ties up those unruly loose ends nés art and commerce. In the equally unruly worlds of newspapers and fashion, this person is Stefano Tonchi, the editor-in-chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine. As T enters the global arena, as part of the International Herald Tribune, we sat down in the newly designed Renzo Piano offices in Times Square to discuss the publication at this pivotal moment.

PAYAM SHARIFI: 032c has always had a particular interest in the sense that some of today’s mainstream magazines are operating in a space that is more “avant-garde” than so-called underground publications are …
STEFANO TONCHI: I worked in a lot of underground magazines and publications, but I think there comes a time when you want something different. “Niche” publications, I would call them today, more than “underground.” I don’t think that niche publications are not interesting anymore, but everything is very kind of over-ground out there. I think that what you call a niche publication is something smart, something that is still very interesting and still a way to get into the world of magazines, if that’s what you want to do. What I learned, putting together the magazine I had for three or four years –

–What was it called?
It was called Westuff. And it was very much about what’s interesting about the Western world.

But you were currently in the Western world when you did this.
Absolutely. You have to think about the early 1980s – Italy was very insular as a culture. And suddenly, in the mid-1980s, it was part of a larger culture, a European culture, an international culture. We had a very selected kind of pop culture, and very little music. Until the early 1980s, we could not even have concerts, because they were forbidden. So suddenly we got exposed to all this great news, and we wanted to create a magazine that had the flavor of, say, Interview magazine, which suddenly we could buy. But going back to the experience that you gain with this kind of publication, when you have to be the editor, the publisher, the graphic designer, the guy that makes the phone calls to get things from one place to the other, that makes the Xerox and that books the hotel, and writes the headlines, you understand all the different steps that go into a publication. It’s just that there comes a time in your life when you say, “Well, I want to understand how a larger publication is made.” From Westuff magazine I went to L’Uomo Vogue, this large magazine. But in the end it was like, what, a 30,000 or 50,000 copy distribution. So I came to the United States and I worked at American Condé Nast, at Self magazine – that was 1.5m or something like that – and then I worked at Esquire. It was really a discovery because it was, especially at Condé Nast, all about research groups and focus groups and you’d get all these numbers – what sells, what doesn’t sell, at the newsstand, what people want, what they don’t want, do they want blond hair, blue eyes …

The Times is a nice combination – it has a very large distribution but at the same time it has a very, very specific distribution: it’s only for people with a certain education and a certain level of income. Because it’s a newspaper that’s expensive to get, especially when you don’t live in New York – I think it’s $500 or $600 for the subscription. So you have a large audience, but at the same time you have a niche audience.

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Especially if you work at the Times; even more so if, like T, you do not need to sell at the newsstands. I knew how to make advertisers happy and I was lucky to have considerable freedom – I was flying under the radar of the NYT newsroom while they were interested only in web ideas.

But the web will not kill magazines. Maybe newspapers, but not in the short term. After all, I do not see a reason why not to work on both sides of the business at the same time. Why leave the luxury magazines business only in the hands of Condé Nast? Luxury magazines will last and will stay successful because they offer something that the web cannot deliver, at least not now. Beautiful images, easy access, and the pleasure and the habit of a whole generation – aged 30 to 60 – who grew up and who lives with magazines. They are going to buy them as long as they live. And they have plenty of money to spend.

So, you have an editorial background, and there’s a kind of drive in publications towards art directors leading editorial charge recently. Is there a threat to text nowadays?
Actually I come more from a photography/art background than from writing and editing. Especially from the moment I moved to a magazine like Vogue Italia, when the words are really irrelevant. So I would say mine is more a photographic/design vision – even the word “vision” says something. You know it’s interesting, I usually do defend the words anyway. I try. When I talk to the art department I don’t always take their side in terms of “less words is better,” “let’s eliminate the text.” That’s the point that really annoys me. Something that I learned after coming here from niche publications is that the primary reason we do this job is to communicate. It’s what we do – whether you want to communicate to ten, or to a million. You have to make yourself understandable. You can do it through pictures – and I think you can tell a lot of stories through pictures; even putting one picture next to another picture can completely change their meanings. But usually you have to use words. A good heading and a good text become very important. And usually in niche media, you give so little importance to the words. You make a text completely unreadable: it doesn’t make any sense because it’s written without any meanings, or you use the type just to design. I’m not against type that is unreadable, but then I call it a design page; I don’t call it something else. Those are some of the major arguments I have with the art department or the graphic designers – I’m not somebody that loves their dictatorship, even though I come from that background. In the same way I don’t believe in the dictatorship of photography.

At least fashion publications in America seem to place an importance on writing more than their European counterparts ... How do you see the difference between what America expects from a publication, as opposed to your experience with European lifestyle and style publications?
I think Americans expect older journalism and a much more linear narrative than we do in Europe. In Italy, we have a tradition of journalism that’s more, say, subjective, that has more space for opinion. There is a lot of first person, there is much less certainty. Americans look in their journalism for more information and more objectivity. They like direct narrative. You have to go step by step.

How would you translate that into your style?
Well you try to be a little bit more literal, a little bit less abstract. We do it less than other publications, because we have the luxury of not having to deal with the newsstand. That is a huge luxury. But everybody in Europe or in Italy understands that what you see published is more a source of inspiration – not instructions on what clothes to run into the store to buy, for instance. Here it’s much more direct. The information has to be fact-checked; if the reader doesn’t find what you sent him to the store to buy, he’s going to get back to you – if a garment is not available for some reason, we have to write, “Made to order, this is the number to call.” And in that sense I think about certainty.

Do you feel that’s an element of rigor? Would you call that rigor?
It is. And I see in this certainty a kind of honesty.

I feel that in T, there is a drive towards sincerity. Before, let’s say ten years ago, I felt there was always a little bit of distance, a bit of tongue-in-cheek. Sophisticated, but it wasn’t taking itself seriously, because it was dealing with fashion, which was not considered “serious.” And I feel that there’s a deliberate thing, that there’s a drive towards sincerity.
There are no justifications for doing fashion. You take it seriously, you look at it – it’s not a cynical kind of approach in that sense. It’s from people that like fashion, like design, like travel, and are quite aware that there are a thousand things that will pass by but the moment you are there, you believe in it. And in that sense you could call it a sort of honesty, a certain sincerity, absolutely.

Do you think there’s a certain amount of uncovering the meaning behind what people don’t ascribe meaning to? A lot of times people tend not to think of fashion as having a discourse …
We like to say that fashion is the closest thing to a “mirror of society” – just because then you have to justify everything that happens in fashion with some social of political reason. That is not true. When you think about fashion and contemporary society, fashion is a mirror of it – but a mirror in the mood, a mirror in the atmosphere, a mirror in the sensibility. It’s a mood mirror. That doesn’t mean that the skirt gets long because the economy is bad – that’s really an old way of reading fashion to make it more relevant than what it is. That’s not the thing. Fashion expresses the mood of people much more than other media. Especially at this specific time. That’s why so many great people are working in fashion, so many designers who have been in many different fields before.

How do you see the specific evolution of fashion and lifestyle, and I would say even moving towards art nowadays, now that art has become more accessible …
Well especially with magazines, we are moving away from simple information and becoming more and more of a very decadent society dealing with the pleasures of life. What is lifestyle? It’s the things that we like to do, the things we don’t consider obligations …

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So how do you define “taste”?
It’s a combination of nature and nurture. Part of your taste is absolutely connected to your upbringing and your geographical roots. You have a certain sense of color; you grow up in an environment with a certain color palette. Grow up in Florence and unless you have some kind of eye problem, you will live in a palette of browns and beiges and greens. There are no neon lights. You get a certain sense of textures, of fabrics. And if you grow up in the Midwest, you probably have a completely different sense of color. So you end up with how you put colors and textures together; there is a certain kind of history, and something comes from “nature” – it’s something you cannot really choose. And on the other side, there is nurture. You can develop a taste and work on your taste and decide on the taste that you want to project, and people think that it’s your taste. That’s very much what many people do here.

It’s almost like a layman’s approach to what you’re doing here …
I mean I also kind of hate the definition of “taste,” “good taste” – I find that very boring, when everything is done in good taste, when actually, people that have style make mistakes and they’re not about conforming. It’s about breaking the rules or taking risks and doing experiments and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. There’s nothing more boring than that sense of conforming to traditions.

This issue is very apropos given the debate surrounding 032c’s new design. Are “flaws” integral to a real sense of style? Must good design today move away from the so-called perfection of an over-designed environment?
Tradition and good taste are very often the enemy of change and evolution. To make mistakes and to reshape things is a necessary process. Aesthetics are an infinite chain of reactions: minimalism after excessive decoration, dirty and crafty after high-tech and industrial. Don’t you find it funny to see all these new hotels trying to look like old castles and dusty English clubs after the over-designed Schrager/Starck hotels of the 1990s? Graphic design, furniture design, and fashion design are just mirroring our social and cultural processes.