OK, first of all, I’m female. Maybe I should have made that clear back when I started writing this but, thing is, I didn’t think I needed to. It has recently come to my attention, however, that I come across as a gay man in print.
Is this embarrassing? I suppose I’ve mentioned anal, referred (somewhat camply) to a ‘boyf‘, suggested the purchase of a spanking paddle… Oh, wait. Yeah. I am totally a gay man trapped in a woman’s body. Suddenly my obsessions with Liza Minnelli, body glitter and the word ‘fabulous’ take on a sinister significance. Chris Grayling probably wouldn’t support my right to stay in the B&B of my choice. But apart from my raving homosexuality, why would you assume that I’m a man writing this? Because no matter how much the public tries to accept and even encourage female sexuality, it still makes all of us a little bit uncomfortable.

What else could explain the public bitch hunt of Belle de Jour and Girl With a One Track Mind, et al? Yes, it makes a great story to expose high profile anonymity, but the impetus behind it seems to be the public shaming of a woman who enjoys, nay, speaks of enjoying sex.

It runs deeper. The press furore around the murder of Meredith Kercher was in large part aimed at the sexual monster that was Amanda Knox, not her boyfriend, who was – incidentally – equally implicated. But you all know this, I‘m not claiming to have uncovered some insidious patriarchal conspiracy. As female Oxford students we’re not ignorant of feminism, we can invoke Irigaray, perhaps a cheeky bit of Butler, but are we more down with the literature than with getting down and dirty?

I can theoretically argue a woman’s right to do the latter with anyone or thing she chooses, but in practice I’ll call someone a slag as quick as the next misogynist. There was a girl at my secondary school who used to sit in the basement of house parties and give blozzers to any male who cared to go down (so to speak). I didn’t respect her empowerment, I laughed at it, and saved it up as a juicy story to use in a sex column years later. Perhaps I should embrace my new found identity as a female identified gay man. I could go to Poptarts, give out as many blozzers as the aforementioned friend and escape judgement from everyone. But B&Bs might be an issue. And I do like a good mini-break.

Jop van Bennekom is super low-key. (He also likes the word ‘super’.) He lives in the Netherlands, where he co-edits Fantastic Man magazine, and about once every month he travels to London to confer with Penny Martin, editor-in-chief of The Gentlewoman. (Jop is also creative director at The Gentlewoman.) Together with Gert Jonkers, Jop’s business partner and co-editor of Fantastic Man, Jop and Penny are responsible for two of the most popular fashion magazines currently going.

Fantastic Man was launched in 2005 and in just five years has achieved an international circulation of around 70,000. Its success has been so great that when Jop and Gert teamed-up with Penny to launch The Gentlewoman, which debuted earlier this spring, expectations were so high that the first issue sold out almost immediately. (I had to go to six newsagents in London before finding a copy.)

‘I was surprised,’ says Jop, ‘because it’s never easy to make a first issue of a magazine. I’ve started up, I think, five magazines now, and it’s always difficult.’

‘My surprise was actually the kind of response,’ says Penny, ‘not so much that we got so many people but the slightly emotional quality of how people responded to the magazine. The slightly frantic kind of excitement over specific things, and how people want to tell you what they liked about it, their favourite bits.’

I met with Jop and Penny at the London office of The Gentlewoman, which occupies the first floor of a nondescript building in Shoreditch. There is no sign, no advertising, no magazine covers plastered to the plate glass front to celebrate the enormous success of the first issue. Inside the floors are plain wood, the walls exposed brick, and simple white work tables support a small but impressive collection iMac computers.

Are you getting that one quality of ‘a gentlewoman’ is her taste for understatement?

Jop and Penny make an interesting pair. Jop is clearly at home in the role of independent magazine publisher. He is low-key but confident, and speaks with the clarity of purpose that comes from starting five magazines from scratch and intermittently spending years living on savings and freelance design work to finance his ideas.

‘I’ve always been into super independent media, the idea of independence when I was a teenager was exciting, and I still think it’s exciting.’
Penny, at least initially, is incredibly demure. Talking about her previous role as editor of Showstudio, a hugely successful fashion website, she declines even to mention the name of its famous founder, photographer Nick Knight. (‘I worked for a key fashion photographer’) She considers each question thoughtfully and answers earnestly, a nod to her role as Professor of Fashion Photography at the London College of Fashion. As the interview progresses, she becomes increasingly animated by all this talk of her new editorial role. Before I leave she will mime Stanislovsky techniques to help me prepare for my turn in the college play.

The magazines that Jop and Penny produce, along with Gert, are clear reflections of their editors’ personalities. Both Fantastic Man and The Gentlewoman cultivate a polite, modernist sensibility. (The captions in Fantastic Man, for instance, refer to subjects as ‘Mr. [name]’.) They are beautifully designed and extremely well-curated, a necessity for publications that issue just twice per year. (Necessary, but not always easy: says Jop, ‘We have so many ideas!’) Most of the features are about people who are exceptional in a comparatively small universe: people like Wolfgang Tillmans, the Turner-prize winning photographer (on the cover of Fantastic Man) and Phoebe Philo, the creative director of fashion house Céline (on the cover of The Gentlewoman).
‘We exert much more opinion and control during the commissioning process,’ says Penny. ‘People understand that it won’t be just a case of turning something in and it will get run as is. Other magazines are like a container that you chuck stuff into.’

Says Jop, ‘We’re working from a much more critical point of view, saying we’re interested in showing breasts in a new way, let’s talk about really small tits or something, you know, just to give an example.’

This kind of creative control is essential to making Fantastic Man and The Gentlewoman different from other magazines. ‘It’s really independent because it’s self-sustainable’, says Jop. ‘If you give in to all this kind of commercial pressure [especially advertisers], you are starting to make exactly the same magazine as all the other magazines because they are all doing that.’
Of course, this kind of independence comes with a price: Jop and Gert lived on savings and freelance work for two years before Fantastic Man finally sold enough to pay its editors any salary. Even now, with both Fantastic Man and The Gentlewoman garnering great success, the mastheads remain thin and the expenditure priority is clearly on the product. (Hence all those iMac’s in an otherwise sparsely furnished office.)

‘It’s professionally run but it’s not lavish,’ says Penny.
‘Exactly,’ says Jop. ‘It’s a different thing to go to fashion shows in Paris and stay in the Ritz, then you spend a computer every night on just sleeping.’ Jop laughs, ‘We’re too Dutch for that!’

Interestingly, low pay and high risk are not the only reasons why Jop and Penny think so few people are doing what they are doing. ‘If you are good,’ says Jop, ‘and you have something to say, there is this whole professional field that you might want to first explore before you maybe want to start your own business.’

In other words, people get stuck in the system?
‘I would have been eaten up by the system if I was British, because I was super eager to work on magazines, interested, and also I’m not a bad designer, so I’m sure I would be in a different place now if I wasn’t in Amsterdam.’

The value of independence comes through again when I ask for advice to budding Oxford journalists. ‘Find your own project,’ says Penny. ‘The best projects come from peers from your own age group, that’s much more viable as an editorial system than trying to look at the generation above you and trying to somehow interest them. It’s about looking sideways instead of looking in front of you.’

If that’s the sort of strategy that produced Fantastic Man and The Gentlewoman, independence may be the new black so far as magazine publishing is concerned.

Race you to the nearest print shop?

When Abel Ferrara, director of the original Bad Lieutenant, heard that Werner Herzog was directing a remake, his reaction wasn’t exactly positive: ‘I wish these people die in Hell. I hope they’re all in the same streetcar, and it blows up.’ In fact, Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant bears little resemblance to the original and is one of the best films of the year (see it from May 21st), yet it is nonetheless symptomatic of Hollywood’s incurable obsession with remakes.
Whether it’s due to a shortage of original ideas or to cash in on brand recognition, remakes keep coming. They may adopt the deceptive guises of ‘reimagining’ or , most recently, ‘reboot’, but remakes they remain. Yet while most are vacuous, moronic, unnecessary and thunderously dull, some have been shown to work if they follow a few simple rules:

1. Remake a bad film

Directors have a worrying tendency to see a film they love and then rush to do their own version. Gus Van Sant remade Psycho shot-for-shot in 1998 to universally derisive reviews, and similar critical reactions have met remakes of The Ladykillers, Get Carter, Alfie and The Wicker Man, to name just a few. Matt Reeves is currently filming an American remake of Let the Right One In, a damn-near perfect Swedish vampire film. Reeves himself said ‘It’s a terrific movie’ So why touch it? It’s no defense to claim to be making the film more accessible to a wider audience – if Reeves really loved it, he would promote the original rather than deposit a pungent cinematic turd on the face of an ungrateful public. Not that I’m prejudging his remake or anything. 

2.Don’t remake your own film  

Michael Haneke made Funny Games in Austria in 1997, a film that depicted horrifically violent acts before shouting at its audience for not walking out in disgust. Clearly Haneke didn’t think enough people had been told off, so remade his own film shot-for-shot eleven years later, only in English. Similarly, when directing The Ring Two and The Grudge 2, the original directors also failed to improve on their original work. Worryingly, David Cronenberg is currently preparing a remake to his 1986 classic The Fly, and although he could conceivably follow in the footsteps of Hitchcock, who remade (and improved upon) his 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956, Hitchcock could be the exception that proves the rule.

3.Ignore the original  

If you must remake a film, it’s best not to watch the original at all. It’s what Herzog has done with Bad Lieutenant, and he’s produced something completely original. Stephen Soderbergh also did this with Ocean’s Eleven, a remake that obeys all three cardinal rules and was very good. Coincidence? I think not.

These rules are by no means comprehensive, but if adhered to, they can be cinematic Rennie’s, slightly easing the pain of the fat, overpaid Hollywood snake eating its own artistically bankrupt tail.

Yesterday afternoon, The Union was graced by a man who certainly knows his fashion: Hubert de Givenchy. The eponymous founder of fashion powerhouse Givenchy is just one of many designers who began their careers by designing, creating and self-promoting. While Givenchy as a French aristocrat certainly had a leg-up into the fashion world, the design, flair and excitement associated with his creations and styling of numerous icons such as Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy were all his own. The House of Givenchy has also nurtured various designers, including John Galliano the late Alexander McQueen, Julian Macdonald and more recently Ricardo Tisci.Yet The fashion industry is undergoing a distinct change that many will argue is not for the better.

Fashion has always formed a close relationship with celebrities, whether they are the muse for a collection, model, or be spokesperson for a campaign. The uniting of an actress or singer to a designer or brand can often become the most influential part of an advertising campaign. From Marilyn Monroe’s iconic perfume ad with Chanel, to recent endorsements by fashionistas such as Alexa Cheung and Taylor Momsen, the fashion industry has closely followed the rise of celebrity and society’s obsession of ‘what are they wearing’. Yet a new fetishism has emerged within fashion: celebrities are no longer satisfied with simply wearing the clothes, there is now a burgeoning desire to design them.
It almost began with a sniff of cocaine. Kate Moss, one of Britain’s most successful supermodels, was caught in a drug scandal in 2005, resulting in being dropped from various labels such as H&M, Burberry and Chanel. However, picked up by Philip Green, owner of the Arcadia Group, the commodification of Kate Moss’ name was a commercial success. The following years have seen ranges from Lily Allen for New Look and Beth Ditto for Evans – yet it is not only the High Street that has witnessed a ‘celebrity revolution’. Although Victoria Beckham’s first designer work was a denim collection for Rock & Republic, she launched her own label during New York’s 2008 fashion week: with various pieces of her recent collections worn by supermodel Elle Macpherson and Leighton Meester.

Yet the transition of celebrities to fashion designer is not always smooth. In September 2009, it was announced that Lindsay Lohan was to become the artistic adviser for French Fashion house Ungaro, but a collection presented with designer Estrella Archs in October received poor reviews, and Lohan left the company in March 2010. Furthermore, many are questioning the propriety of celebrities becoming designers when they have often received no or little training. In February 2010 it was publicized that Olivia Palermo, of The City fame, was to become a spokesmodel for Matches’ Freda label, and recently she has launched a range of jewellery in collaboration with Roberta Freymann. Celebrities or socialites are seen to be using their own status to perpetuate themselves and their designs in the fashion industry, regardless of their competence, originality of creativity. In Kate Moss’ debut collection for Topshop a simple t-shirt vest sold for £12, double the price of Topshop’s own designs.
However, it is not in the realm of celebrities moving into fashion design that this aesthetic incest is taking place. While designers themselves have always had some status of celebrity (it helps by selling something that has your name on it), in recent years programmes such as Project Catwalk have raised the profile of many designers in the non-fashionista world. T4’s recent offering, Frock Me With TK Maxx has seen Henry Holland’s transition from the sewing machine to the camera lens. Not only is he dressing people, but he interviews the very celebrities he is dressing.

The question is, why should we care? For one, the application of a name or profile to a designer or brand can often not only increase profitability but also raise awareness: Emma Watson’s collection for People Tree has certainly raised valid points about ethical fashion. Yet it is the budding designers that this current fad is affecting. The power of the brand-name obsession, created and sustained by celebrities themselves, runs the risk of not only undermining years of study but also overshadows true creativity and flair. For celebrities, designing seems a leisure activity, an additional stream of income and a further commodification of their own name, but for designers themselves it is a passion and a career. In an industry where competition is still fierce, it utters a solemn request to celebrities: perhaps they should stick to their day jobs?

Wem. Where do I start? It is a very small market town in the north of Shropshire. You haven’t heard of Shropshire? It’s close to Wales.
Wem boasts both a primary and a secondary school, the latter of which was afforded its fifteen minutes of fame about eight years ago when the headmaster poached several thousand from the school’s budget and was duly ousted and tried for theft.

Another exciting feature of the Wem landscape is the surprising religious presence. We have our standard Anglican and Catholic Churches, along with a friendly Methodist, and then a nutty Baptist thrown in for good measure. Fortunately the various representatives of organised religion are only given limited air-time in the secular paradise that is Wem; only at weekly assemblies, youth groups and annual Bible activity weeks for the town’s children are the faith groups let loose.

A few years ago, the council tried to close down the town’s swimming pool. Aged fourteen, I couldn’t resist a good cause – my stubborn vegetarianism is a rusty relic of those heady days – and so joined the righteous campaign of the swimmers and invested in a ‘save Wem pool’ t-shirt. I say invested, but really there is no other occasion on which such an item is wearable. I am still waiting for someone to come up with a suitable fancy dress theme.

I have worked at the local supermarket for several years, and every return home brings with it the predictable ‘so, when are you back?’ enquiries. Good to know I always have shelf stacking if the degree doesn’t come through for me. The people of Wem are surprisingly impolite to the staff of the Co-operative supermarket: highlights of my experience there include ducking a loaf of bread-turned-projectile-missile when a customer angrily declared that it was ‘too expensive’, and the time I unwittingly incurring the wrath of the woman who could not understand why we only stocked two sizes of tinned peas.
I would be lying if I said we went to Wem to ‘go out’. There is one good restaurant, the waiter knows ‘my usual’, and the staff have seen me embarrassingly drunk too many times for me to look them in the eye these days. The various pubs have few redeeming features, and besides, all the cool kids have other places to be – as far as I know the place to hang out in the evening is outside the public toilets on the playground. To my (not so) great disappointment, my invitation to this nightly get-togethers has as yet failed to materialise.

These days my family actually lives in Aston, which is in fact half a mile outside of Wem, and therefore enjoys various amenities which reflect its separate status, including, and limited to, a post box and a broken phone box. Aston is in fact a road with fewer than fifteen houses. The demographic is heavily pensioner biased, but with the arrival of my very large family the average age dropped by a good twenty years. The corresponding levels of rowdiness have, I feel, been to everyone’s liking. I like to think the farmer has developed a fondness for our ‘hilarious’ tradition of drunkenly throwing the same traffic cone in the river every vacation. Fortunately for me Aston is a very friendly place, from the sheep which wander into the garden, the quiet man down the road who leaves his home-grown sprouts atop cars every Christmas Eve, and the neighbours who pitched in to lift out the car my visiting friend inexplicably managed to drive into someone’s front garden. Sometimes I feel like we live in an episode of The Archers.