That’s funny Stuff, and he’ll need it. Last week the 35-year-old James Truman, editor of Details, the hip young men’s magazine, was named–to succeed Alexander Liberman, the 81-year-old legendary magazine–design and cultural czar who helped create the look of such Conde Nast powerhouses as Vogue, Vanity Fair and Bride’s. On paper at least, that title gives the mop-headed Truman wide-ranging influence over Conde Nast’s 13 magazines, many of them America’s leading cultural and fashion trendsetters. That everyone said it was a long-awaited changing of the guard seemed a fabulous understatement. It was Information Superhighway meeting drafting board. Generation X sensibilities supplanting over-the-hill baby boomers’. Conde Nast chairman S.I. Newhouse Jr. said the change didn’t signal a new strategy for the company: “This represents a move for continuity.” But Martin S. Walker, a New York magazine consultant, said, “Si Newhouse recognizes that the world is changing dramatically, and all to a different generation.”
Liberman’s decision to step aside was long rumored. What stunned even the jaded was the leapfrog choice of Truman, a shy, scruffy man with a taste for boxing and cooking who came to New York from England at 21. After working as a music writer and a Vogue editor, he was named editor of Conde Nast’s Details in 1990. He smartly converted it from a women-oriented publication covering the downtown club scene into an aggressively ultracool magazine for young, twenty-something men. It now boasts a healthy circulation of 480,000 readers, who this month can cruise among articles about rock group U2, written by cyberspacer William Gibson: a sex column on exotic venues for doing it, or winter-sports fashions. (NEWSWEEK Senior Editor John Leland, 34, was named to replace Truman.)
Exercising his traditional power, Liberman handpicked Truman. “He’s proven to be a very brilliant editor. His generation is very alert to the sorts of changes in culture music, electronic revolution, QVC–that I know nothing about,” said Liberman. “It’s only people over 45 who are surprised,” said Vogue editor Anna Wintour, 44 (who called “rubbish” the rumors that she was peeved at being passed over). But to some others in the watch-your-back, ego-saturated world of Conde Nast, Truman’s sole big success-at a magazine once called “MTV on paper,” no less-seemed hardly sufficient to qualify him to take charge of a magazine empire. “I hear, and I don’t know if it’s true,” whispered one editor, “that one reason Details circulation is doing so well is he gave away CDs, or something like that.” This is one tough crowd, indeed. The sixty-something Paige Rense, editor of Architectural Digest, told The New York Times: “If he starts telling me what to do, I am going to spank him and send him to bed without his dinner.” To which Truman replied, in a note to Rense: “Your place or mine.”
Such humor-and the ability to get along in the Conde Nast hotbed-was probably as important as anything in his selection. Newhouse, also shy, is said to feel quite comfortable with Truman.
What will he do? First, troubleshoot: while many Conde Nast magazines are industry pace setters, some “need someone who’s recognizing what’s happening today to keep a fresh, quirky feel,” says consultant Walker. Says Truman, “My job is not to be a kind of supereditor above the editors but to help them shape what they do.”
That’s how Liberman describes his own role, too, but it hardly does it justice. His polite suggestions" promptly resulted in pages and covers being ripped up and redone. While Liberman usually kept his hands clean, Vogue editors like Diana Vreeland and Grace Mirabella lost their jobs in brutal shake-ups. That did little to tarnish his reputation as perhaps the country’s most influential magazine designer. Russian-born, he was hired bv Conde Nast himself in Vogue’s art department in 1941. Splashing dramatic photos, he transformed the haute couture publication into a mass-market vehicle that remains the leading women’s fashion magazine. He became editorial director for all Conde Nast publications in 1963, a position that allowed him to put his stamp–“I hate white space. I hate clean” on the Conde Nast stable.
Truman’s stamp? For all the talk of targeting young people, some experts think they will never read papers and magazines in large numbers. Besides, it’s silly to think Truman would tilt all the Conde Nast titles to Generation X. But he is fluent in the language of the “new media,” and Newhouse himself is preparing for that day; he has promised $500 million to QVC Network in its bid for Paramount Communications. What does it mean for magazines? Who knows. Just keep your PowerBook handy.
