March 13, 2012 |
The editor-in-chief of Style.com begins today’s interview with an apology. “At this point in the season I’m never particularly coherent,” says Dirk Standen, chuckling. “I think you might have to compensate for that.” Though not exactly the most promising of starts, it’s little wonder that, as the man responsible for the sharpest fashion website on the planet, Standen is – to put it bluntly – rather knackered.
It’s the tail end of London Fashion Week and, with Milan and Paris still to come in the season, Standen still has a good hundred shows left to attend, possibly double that in parties and – ooh – about a million and one meetings, appointments, re-sees and what-have-yous before heading back home to New York. And this season, Standen has, by his own admission, made his life a whole lot harder. Ten days after the Paris shows finish, Style.com are launching a brand new venture – their first print magazine. “It’s definitely a challenging time,” he says, understating things somewhat. “But then I’ve always liked a challenge.”
As it turns out, Standen is far more coherent than he probably should be, given his ever-punishing schedule. We start, naturally enough, on the subject of the much-anticipated magazine. While commentators have obviously been intrigued by the idea of a website suddenly embracing “old” media, Standen argues that it was a pretty natural move for the brand. “The conversation came up fairly quickly after we moved from Condé Nast Digital to being part of Condé Nast’s Fairchild division,” he explains. “I think the impetus behind it was that Fairchild has a fair amount of expertise and a great history of doing magazines. And the thought was that, these days, you can’t really just be in one medium anymore. The more places you can reach your readers, the better.” Leaving all talk of 360-degree, cross-platform this and that to one side, Standen says the goal of the magazine is to provide a swift, succinct take on the season. “It should provide this instant portrait,” he says. “The aim is to obviously spotlight the people and the clothes that were important this season but also hopefully take you a little bit deeper inside the process and the life of the people who are thrown together in this high-stakes environment for this extraordinary four-week period,” he says. “We’ve got photographers following certain people around, but then we’ll also do a lot of the kind of reporting that we already do. It’s important that the magazine has a certain authority.”
The magazine’s deadlines are, by print standards at least, buttock-clenchingly tight. Standen doesn’t seem overly fazed, however. “The good thing is that we haven’t done a magazine before, so maybe ignorance is bliss in this case,” he says, laughing. “Maybe we don’t know quite what a tough task we’ve set ourselves. But speed has always been part of Style.com – maybe one of the most important parts, and we thought if we’re gonna do a magazine then it should reflect that, too. So that was the impulse in terms of how quickly we want to close this.”
While maintaining the website’s insider edge, Standen argues that the magazine needs to have a broad appeal and be more than just an industry circle-jerk. “One of the things that Style.com has done is to open up what was a closed system to everyone,” he says. “In a way, I think everyone has become a fashion insider. I don’t really distinguish between someone in the industry who is coming to the site or that girl in Minnesota who is just discovering fashion. To me, they both share this obsession with fashion and they’re both insiders in their own particular way.”
For his part, Standen “discovered fashion’” in a rather roundabout manner. “I’m part of that generation who were in their teenage years in the post-punk era,” he says. “There was that incredible explosion of different styles in London and New York, and magazines like The Face and i-D came along, but I didn’t think it would be my career. Having said that, fashion has always been a part of my life.” While studying film at Columbia, New York, Standen began writing restaurant reviews as a way to subsidise his income (and get the odd free meal). “You go on all those pitch meetings where you’re trying to get a film project off the ground and end up going to a lot of restaurants,” he says. “You double your money by writing about them at the same time.” After realising that “Hollywood wasn’t exactly calling at that point”, Standen took a series of internet-based positions for young start-ups and for Microsoft before joining Condé Nast. In 2004, he was appointed the launch editor of Men.style.com, before taking overall responsibility for the site soon after. When Men.style.com was dismantled during a restructuring exercise in 2009, Standen was, to say the least, rather gutted. “That was my baby, in a way,” he says. “Men’s fashion has always been my first interest and obviously I was upset about it. But funnily enough, there has been some talk recently about bringing Men.style.com back. Certainly we’re doing a lot more men’s coverage and, business-wise, the men’s market seems to be growing by leaps and bounds. The audience is there and we have the interest. It would be great if it did happen.”
In the meantime, Standen is also busy working on The Instant Get, a project that will see Style.com dipping a tentative toe into the world of e-commerce. Collaborating with six young New York-based designers, the site will be selling a piece from each of their collections and making them available immediately when the new magazine launches, “meaning they’ll be delivered right away – you won’t have to wait three months to buy them”. It’s a project that Standen is clearly excited about and, though not entirely new in conceit, suggests a whole new range of possibilities for the brand. “I think the reader wants stuff right away now,” says Standen. “And obviously a lot of designers are trying to figure out, in their own ways, how to deliver products more quickly to the consumer. At the moment, the risk is obviously that, by the time they get in the stores, that desire has, to some degree, already passed. It’s definitely a broader conversation in the industry that everyone is having right now.”
Does Standen feel at all responsible for accelerating this demand and potentially making designers’ lives a whole lot more difficult in the process? “Well, obviously, by providing instant access to those images from the runway, that did speed up consumer demand,” he concedes with a smile. “But I guess our attitude is once the horse is out the barn, you can’t get it back, so let’s try to figure out some ways to deliver what the consumer wants. I definitely think something has to change.”
Such change, argues Standen, could represent a radical shift in the way fashion is consumed. “Everyone I speak to says that one person will come along and change this system at some point,” he says. “If you think about when Helmut Lang decided to show earlier in New York, within a couple of seasons it had changed the whole calendar. So maybe there is one company or person who is powerful enough to take a stand. But I think it would probably have to involve a different approach to runway shows.”
For his part, it sounds like Standen might welcome, if not an entirely new approach, then possibly a few fewer shows in the schedule. Though he confesses to “absolutely loving what I do”, for Standen the season can be an intensely emotional experience nevertheless. “You do have these incredible highs and then these incredible lows,” he says. “And sometimes it’s just a slog. But then you’ll also have these wonderful grace moments during the season as well.”
Such a moment arrived a few weeks back, at a karaoke party in New York thrown by Carine Roitfeld and Barneys. “Carine was up there with Anna Dello Russo and then various people,” he recalls. “And then at one point, they announced ‘would Mr Valentino Garavani please come to the stage’. And he got up and sang My Way. With Giancarlo Giammetti on backing vocals. And he did it brilliantly, completely unironically. And to me, that’s the experience of the shows. The one thing is that you’re hardly ever get bored. Whether you’re enjoying it or not, this life is never boring.”
by Glenn Waldron
