Sweating the Details

By James Poniewozik

A guy needs big cojones to stay on top in the vicious field of men's-magazine editing today. More important, he needs big hooters. Mark Golin had both. As editor of Maxim, founded in 1997, he audaciously jettisoned the literary pretense and fashion froufrou of traditional men's mags, hanging a promise of SEX--SPORTS--BEER on the cover like a neon sign on a strip club. There were dirty jokes, a winking attitude and girls, girls, girls, proffering their ample bosoms in bikini tops and less. Shockingly, young men showed up in droves. "Maxim came at the end of a long, dreary, p.c. era," says Golin. "It said, 'Be a guy, have some fun! No one's going to shoot you for it.'"

No, but Maxim left a pile of bullet-ridden corpses of competing magazines and spawned such raunchy followers as FHM, which, like Maxim, tried to Americanize the British "lad mag." But the most glaring ratification of Maxim's success came last spring, when the Conde Nast magazine empire brought in Golin to edit the archrival young-men's magazine Details. So it was all the more stunning when last Monday, less than a year into the hot editor's tenure, Conde Nast president Steve Florio told a hastily convened Details staff to clean out their desks by Friday, confounding staff members who believed they had over a year more to raise circulation from around 540,000 to the estimated 700,000 to 800,000 that Details needed to be viable. Says just hired editor Kendall Hamilton: "It was a smack in the head with a halibut."

Who lost Details? In fairness, it was on the critical list before Golin. Under the editorship of James Truman--now editorial director of all Conde Nast magazines--Details enjoyed early-'90s acclaim as a stylish bible of the downtown club scene. But it floundered, changing editors like Polo boxer-briefs and redefining itself constantly, most recently as a pop-culture gazette with a dash of red-blooded sex.

In rethinking Details, Golin and Conde Nast fatally tried to imitate Maxim without imitating Maxim. Golin, along with a crew imported from his former magazine, went counter to his sleaze-master typecasting, adding un-Maxim-like service articles on money and career. To stave off the lad mags, he also sexed up covers with screaming tag lines--NUDE YEAR'S EVE--and skin. "Yes, we had women on our cover," he says. "But for the most part, they weren't leaning forward; we weren't picking them for their breast size." (Such is the definition of classiness in guy culture today.) And the publisher, known for such upscale glossies as Vogue, GQ and Gourmet, was inflamed by Maxim's voluptuous numbers but too squeamish--and fearful of losing high-end advertisers--to bare all. "We learned that we are an upmarket publisher," says Truman. Or, as a former editor puts it, "they couldn't fully embrace the gutter." The schizo result--skin on the cover, earnest advice articles on the inside-- satisfied hardly anyone: Maxim readers, old pop-culture-conscious Details readers or advertisers. Ad pages and newsstand sales fell, and with them the ax.

The zig-zag-and-fall of Details was more than a clash between tony Conde Nast culture and the ruffian lad-mag sensibility. It was a clash between rival ideas of manhood. Men's mags have slavered over women before--remember Vargas girls?--but with an affect of gentlemen's-club exclusivity. Young men turned to them as tutors in the mysteries of manhood. Today youths prefer populist outlets like Maxim and TV's The Man Show, which toast an uncomplicated guy-hood. Details, finally, didn't party hard enough.

Details will relaunch in October as a men's-fashion magazine under Conde Nast's newly acquired sister company, Fairchild, which publishes W and Jane. Meanwhile, Maxim, its circulation more than 1.6 million, is the undisputed frat-house president, and it's doubtful anyone can challenge it without embracing the mammarian flat-out. "When Mark and I were at Maxim," says erstwhile Details executive editor Bill Shapiro, "our whole mission in life was to destroy Details, to eat Details for lunch." Mission accomplished, guys.

--With reporting by Ellin Martens/New York

With reporting by Ellin Martens/New York