There's a new star in the glossy magazine firmament - even though it's not exactly glossy. Faithful to its ethos of style-conscious chic, the cover of Frank magazine is matt laminate, the waxy-looking surface that is increasingly de rigueur among the hipper book publishers. But surely to goodness women need another magazine like they need another basket of ironing? But there's a lot of advertising money desperate to attract the new-monied thirtysomethings, thus Wagadon - the publisher of those other successful 1990s monthlies The Face and Arena - was anxious to add a smart women's title to its stable. The timing is, to say the least, interesting. Women's glossies appear to be on the wane - the hottest selling titles now are men's magazines, or rather lads' magazines such as Loaded and FHM - less New Man than Hungover Man, offering a middleshelf menu of football, clothes, cars, babes and booze.
In spite of Frank's front cover assertion: "You Asked For It", there was apparently no major market research carried out in advance. Just a gut feeling, says its editor, Tina Gaudoin, aged 35. "I am my own target reader and Frank is a mindset rather than anything else. I like it not to be alienating or elitist with a capital E." she explains. "I'd like anyone to feel they can pick it up and appreciate the humour and irreverence of it." The most obvious difference between Frank and its rivals is that it's not fashion-led.
Clothes, make-up and hair account for less than half the editorial (if most of the ads). Frank is a magazine you don't so much look at, as read. As Gaudoin says, "we offer more words, intelligent words, witty words. The fact that we've used lots of newspaper journalists rather than magazine journalists has been really helpful."
The first issue is certainly impressive, with Vanity Fair-length stories ranging from profiles of craggy film actor Pete Poslethwaite and playwright-with-attitude Mark Ravenhill. Features range from Bosnia, adoption and breast cancer to French footwear designer Rodolphe Menudier ("from his shag-pile run to his shag-me shoes"). Frank is tasteful only in its design. Breasts are called tits (except in the piece on breast cancer). The only forbidden word, it would appear, is the S**** Girls, and there is no sign of the usual women's mag staple of how to get/keep/chuck-your-man stories. A policy decision, says Gaudoin. Ditto horoscopes. Marie O'Riordan, editor of Elle, not surprisingly says she is not impressed. "It lacks a lightness of touch. It wears its intelligence on its sleeve, as if to say `Just in case you think you're a trivial sort of person, here's a piece on Bosnia'." O'Riordan says defensively that Frank doesn't have the monopoly on humour or good writing, citing her current issue's interview with Martin Amis by Chrissie Iley. In the hallowed field of fashion, however, Frank has already broken the mould, featuring a model who is eight-and-a-half months pregnant. The bump is displayed in all its goose-pimply fleshy glory. It was something Tina Gaudoin has wanted to do since her own pregnancy. "I felt there was still a taboo attached to being pregnant. Women have rarely been encouraged to glorify their shape."
There have been a few carpers, she says, and she welcomes them. "I'd rather have that sort of reaction than none at all. One of the things I set out to do with Frank was to have people saying that they either loved it or loathed it. If people said it's nice then we're not doing our job properly." EQUALLY strong on good writing is another new entry on the magazine stands called Cover, an exercise in "compilation publishing", which carries choice articles carefully selected from both magazines and newspapers. "Think of it as a kind of taster," says editor Danny Danziger. "It directs you to to writers and writing you may not know about." With the sheer volume of print we're faced with these days, we can't read everything, is the theory, so here's an alternative.
Comparisons to Reader's Digest distress him ("unreadable"), though its staggering sales worldwide are mouth watering and he can't deny they cover the same ground, though Cover's stories are always run in full, as originally written. With 12 researchers in Britain, two in the US and one each in Paris and Sydney, the scope is infinite.
Like the writing of Danziger himself, a columnist currently with the Sunday Times, the emphasis is on wit and humour. As yet the emphasis is on work from these islands. ("It is quite simply the best in the world.") And the absence of serious photo-journalism in Britain and Ireland is balanced with stunning photography from Geo and National Geographic magazines which needs no translation, not to mention a picture story from the Hurlingham Polo magazine on a young sculptor whose medium is grass and dew and whose tools are a brush and rake.