Ariel Foxman - Issue 5 ESCAPE Curated By AKMAL SHAUKAT

As Editor of InStyle, Ariel Foxman reigns over the most successful fashion magazines in America. The Harvard graduate got his start in magazine as the assistant to Details editor-in-chief Joe Dolce before going on to be founding editor-in-chief of the men’s magazine Cargo at the age of 29. We chatted with Foxman about how he fell in love with magazines and what he thinks about the current state of the publishing business. I always loved magazines as a child. In school every month you could order books about kittens and puppies and books about presidents. I would save my change to buy this magazine called Dynamite which was a children’s People Magazine. My parents used to get annoyed that I would never buy books and I would always buy magazines. I loved the sort of glossiness of it and I loved that you could keep them and stack them and obsess over them. I didn’t have the patience to finish a book. With a magazine, you don’t have that problem. If you don’t like something, you turn the page, and there’s something else, or the next issue. I just knew it was more exciting than television, more exciting than cartoons. It was more exciting than toys. It felt like it was delivering some sort of diorama into another world. And I liked that. When I had money I would buy magazines that transported you to this other world, knowing full well that I wouldn’t even read anything. I would buy GQ when we travelled. I didn’t know who or what they were talking about. I just liked holding it and looking at it. I liked how thick it was. It felt really adult. It was about having a level of sophistication and talking about it, which is probably the most unsophisticated thing you can do. I still remember buying a Vanity Fair with Barbra Streisand in that off the shoulder sweater. I remember taking it upstairs to my room, and looking at it and not understanding any of who was in it but knowing, this is a good magazine. I remember going to Charivari for the first time after seeing a Charivari credit in GQ. I was very excited to having put two and two together. Where I grew up in New Jersey was only ten minutes away from the Charivari store on the Upper West Side but being at Charivari felt like being seven hours away. I also bought a lot of the Face and Arena. I thought, like every American, oh my god it’s British! I’m not paying the price that’s printed, I’m paying the price on a sticker! This magazine’s even cooler! As my first job I worked at Random House Books and some woman came over from Details to be an editor at this imprint that I worked at. She said to me, ‘Oh honey, what are you doing here?’ And she said, “The editor at Details is looking for an assistant. I’ll call right him now!’ I lived on 16th street opposite the old Barney’s. And on the way home I took whatever money I had to upgrade an outfit that I thought would fly at Details. I was working at Crown Books and spending seventy dollars on Hushpuppies. It was the time when Prada did that seat belt buckle belt and I got that. It must have been like, two, three, found hundred dollars, I don’t know, I couldn’t afford it and I bought it. I thought ‘When I get the job it’ll pay for the belt’. I interviewed and I wore the belt, and months later, he told me he hired because he liked my belt. The first day I got to Details they said tonight is our music party. And two assistants are coming one is assigned to Cher, and the other is assigned to Shirley Manson. You just have to shadow them and make sure they have drinks. I begged to have Shirley Manson, because that was too much on my first day to shadow Cher. I don’t know if I’d be where I am at today I weren’t the assistant to the editor-in-chief for those three years. I was a great assistant and not so much because I got the dry cleaning or whatever – I did those things. I was really, really good at being anticipatory of a person’s needs. I think if you’re highly co-dependent you’re an amazing assistant. I was also very worshipful. Everything about it was so glamorous and this guy is so smart and this magazine is so successful and this office is so hip! What could I do to make this thing run more smoothly? And I did. We have two roles at InStyle, as a magazine in a woman’s life. We are a fashion magazine, and we report on fashion like Sports Illustrated reports on sports, right? But, we also have to make sense of it for our reader—and inspire her to make her every day that more stylish. The launch editor of the magazine, instituted the hot pants barometer. Once somebody was advocating to cover hot pants in book since it was as a big trend. She said to this fashion editor, ‘Well, okay, if you came to the office this week wearing hot pants and wear them all day long, then we’ll cover this.” Everyone laughed. This woman would never wear hot pants to Time Inc, and obviously, they never ended up covering hot pants. Now in 2012, we’ve given many more pages to high fashion because our reader is much more in tune with it, because everyone is. We’ll cover a trend because you’ll see it on the red carpet, and we want you to understand why you are seeing it and where it is coming from. But, we’re not necessarily pushing it as a wearable trend. We just had this two seasons ago with the bare midriffs. You know, we’re sitting at shows, and eighty percent of the shows have women coming down with flat stomachs with bare midriff looks, for day and for night. And we came home and we thought, okay, you can’t ignore it. It’s news. We present it, but with caveats. We don’t shoot models for fashion stories. The reason we don’t is at the end of the day the magazine is a celebrity fashion magazine and we have incredible access to the world’s most famous women. So given the opportunity to shoot couture on Gwyneth Paltrow or couture on a model our reader doesn’t even know, why wouldn’t we choose Gwyneth Paltrow? It only adds a layer of interest and inspiration for the reader, so we don’t. Artwork RICHARD HAINES Interview MICKEY BOARDMAN