Details

» see details.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

details lived in the part of the us magazine rack that never landed on a turkish newsstand. by the time i was reading english-language magazines, in the mid-2000s in ankara, gq had already absorbed the visible half of the us men's monthly space and details was the smaller sibling on the same rack behind it. what i saw of it was second-hand: james truman's editor byline in later magazine-history essays, dan peres in industry interviews near the end. the object itself i barely handled.

details launched in 1982 as a downtown new york culture magazine, put together by annie flanders and some former soho weekly news staff including bill cunningham. through the mid-1980s the title changed hands, first to a british publisher and then to a new york entrepreneur, before alan patricof bought it in 1988. condé nast bought it in 1989 for $2 million. james truman took the editor chair around 1990 and repositioned the magazine as a men's fashion monthly rather than a downtown scene book.

honestly. dan peres came in around 2000 and ran the title for the next fifteen years. peak reported circulation was 456,666 for the december 2012 issue. through the early 2010s the print advertising in the us men's category was contracting hard against gq and esquire on the print side, with the digital men's-content wave from complex and the gawker-adjacent men's blogs taking the ad dollars that had once come to details. condé nast announced the closure in november 2015. the final issue was dated december 2015 / january 2016.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the flanders era was ~

the 1982 to 1988 version of details is described in later histories as a downtown scene magazine, closer to interview or paper than to gq. flanders had been at the soho weekly news, which had folded in 1982. she pulled together contributors from that paper's fashion and culture beats. bill cunningham was one of them. the tone was downtown arts and nightlife, with a style layer on top. that title got fashion-industry attention for the coverage but never scaled the ad business under the flanders masthead. by the time patricof and condé nast bought it in the late 1980s the object was moving under different editorial hands.

~ the condé nast men's magazine ~

what condé nast did with the property was more or less a full relaunch. james truman, hired by si newhouse jr, kept the details name and jettisoned most of the downtown positioning. the magazine became a monthly for a young men's audience, sitting somewhere between rolling stone and gq without being either. under dan peres from 2000 the title pushed harder on fashion and men's grooming coverage. between 1997 and 1999 the magazine ran a small pioneering comics-journalism run under art spiegelman with pieces by joe sacco and charles burns. the peer reference used at the time was gq for the men's fashion side and vanity fair for the long-form profiles.

~ how the closure was announced ~

the announcement in early november 2015 was a memo from condé nast confirming that details would fold with the december 2015 / january 2016 issue. dan peres and publisher drew schutte would leave the company. roughly sixty other staff had to reapply for other positions inside condé nast, with the trade press estimating maybe twenty percent would land. the ad business the title had generated was expected to migrate to gq under matt abramson, and the digital audience got redirected to a new gq style vertical that took over the details url.

~ the next chapter ~

details ended in the same window as several other condé nast graves. lucky closed a month earlier in november 2015. metropolitan home and ladies' home journal were on their own separate wind-downs at hearst and meredith around the same period, with the gourmet closure back in 2009 sitting as the earlier precedent. the us print-magazine category was thinning across the whole rack. details was one of the mid-tier casualties. the gq style vertical that inherited the domain kept running for a few more years before it became one more url in the condé nast fashion stack rather than a separate magazine.

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