December 7, 2004
Embracing Black Fashion and a Great Deal More
By DAVID CARR
Even the most discerning listener could end up at wit's end trying to parse Suzanne Boyd's accent. There are hints of French and British and even Scottish lilts in her voice, and then she tosses in an "eh" that could come only from the Great White North.
Ms. Boyd is the editor in chief and the muse of Suede, a freshly hatched fashion and culture magazine aimed at a polyglot audience, so it make sense that she sounds as if she comes from almost everywhere when she speaks.
She actually most recently edited Flare, Canada's leading fashion magazine, with headquarters in Toronto. Her new urban-inflected American publication lands somewhere between the street and the runway.
At 5-foot-10 - 6-foot-4 if you count the abundant hair and stilettos - Ms. Boyd is tough to miss. New York is just the latest stop on a long and complicated itinerary. Born in Halifax and reared in Dominica, an island between Guadalupe and Martinique in the Caribbean, she picked up the tiny island's French influence, then went on to Jamaica and attended Immaculate Conception high school, where she was drilled in the queen's English. Time in Barbados working as a reporter exposed her to the Scottish way with the language. Toss in her stint as a club kid in Toronto, and she is tough to pin down. And all that comes before you find out that she is a serious surfer, which adds another whole dynamic to her speech.
Suede, the magazine she began making in March and first published in September, is a similar collage, a mix and match of high and low, urban and couture, bling and fling.
"We wanted so that when readers looked at a page, it had to reference things in addition to fashion, whether it was the street, hip-hop or grafitti - African-American iconography both old and new," Ms. Boyd said.
The magazine, which will come out almost monthly next year (nine issues), was conceived as a publication that would appeal to the millions of black and multiethnic women who have plenty of money to spend on blush but have specific requirements for hues.
Instead of confecting an ethnic version of the existing fashion magazine, Ms. Boyd cooked up something that has little precedent. Suede has a Pop Art logo, a narrative pushed through the prism of contemporary black culture and a Polaroid-influenced photo approach, with things tacked and taped and plopped everywhere. In the inaugural issue, an opening spread of epically refined church ladies is soon followed by a feature called "Blah, Blah," which is rife with gossip and juicy bits.
The magazine careens from hip-hop icons to full-stop fashion photography, with advice and product coverage strewn throughout. It can be naughty (women are encouraged to trade favors with the famous) and baldly commercial (hand-scrawled Rolodex cards for some advertisers are arrayed on a pop-out page). The magazine is frenetic in a way few fashion publications would dare to be. It can be exhausting to stare at. But sitting on a rack of me-too fashion magazines, it evokes significant exhilaration as well.
"I like shiny things," Ms. Boyd, 41, said, her face framed by four-inch vintage crystal chandelier earrings. She giggled as she said it, her hand covering her mouth during an interview in an office above Times Square. The tittering, which pops out from beneath an improbable riot of spiky curls, is not exactly a front, but it does reflect her approach to putting out a magazine. Ms. Boyd is a full-blown diva who demands - she would say requires - that everyone around her push past the edges of what has been done.
"I like to lead in a way that is directional, that is therefore clear," she said. "If you are not precise about what you want, you are not doing anyone any favors."
When P. Diddy has his own store on Fifth Avenue, along with a fragrance deal with Estée Lauder, and Jennifer Lopez sets fashion trends for women of all sorts, Ms. Boyd said, black audiences have a magazine that reflects their roles as consumers and influencers. Ms. Boyd herself is not shy about sticking out: she wore $500,000 in borrowed jewelry to Flare's 25th anniversary party. But she thinks that the transmission of street wear into fashion trend needs to be documented and recognized.
"We want to reference culture as much as shopping," she said, although decked out in Gucci suit and Chanel shoes, Ms. Boyd knows her way around a designer store. "We wanted hot weather, brown skin, the kind of urban feel that has had a lot of influence on the runway."
Ms. Boyd and her crew pay attention to high fashion and consumer trends, but they draw inspiration from music videos, club fashions and the girl down the block with the hair that will not quit.
"Suzanne is very aware of the cultural complexity of the times that we live in," said Rufus Albemarle of Albemarle Eason, a branding group. "She is very much about closing the division between fashion and other aspects of the culture."
Whether advertisers will respond to what has been a traditionally underserved market remains an open question for a magazine aimed at the growing ethnic market. The magazine has a a rate base - the number of readers promised to advertisers - of 250,000 and will publish its third issue in February. In the publishing circles the magazine has created a rare bit of excitement, the kind of currency that would normally have advertisers leaping into the arms of the latest, hottest thing. While cosmetics firms like Clinique and Lancôme have jumped in, many fashion advertisers are waiting to see where the magazine goes. Executives at Essence Communications and Time Inc., which is a 49 percent partner in the company, are happy to have a magazine people are talking about, but they would like to see their new project blow up huge with a lot of ads as well.
"There is a frustration in what we do," said Michelle Ebanks, group publisher at Essence Communications Group, which has been publishing Essence magazine for 34 years. "In a sense, there is not a road, not a path, that we go down. And because there is no pavement, we have to work a lot harder. We can't just sell the magazine. We have to sell the audience. We have to explain that our audience buys things, that they are valuable. It's just plain dollars and sense."
The company's partners at Time Inc. say Suede could be a breakthrough product. Isolde Motley, corporate editor at Time Inc., has had her eye on Ms. Boyd for years, and when Essence talked about adding a fashion magazine, she suggested that Ms. Boyd had been more or less training for exactly that role for years.
"Some years ago, I was flipping through a copy of Flare, and in the editor's note there was a picture of Suzanne, who was wearing an evening dress that she had designed out of a Hudson Bay blanket," she said. "Years later, those dresses showed up on the runway. This is a person who has a complete and passionate vision for what she wants to do. She already had the whole magazine in her head."
In putting the magazine together, Ms. Boyd did not just start from scratch. Flare brought her to the attention of designers, who were more than willing to lend her clothes for photo shoots, and she had longstanding relationships with fashion writers and photographers. Bryan Adams, a fellow Canadian who achieved prominence as a huge-selling pop star in the 1980's and 90's, contributed photos for a fashion shoot in New Orleans in the inaugural issue.
"I have known Suzanne for about seven years," Mr. Adams said. "I have always thought of her as a surfer chick from the Dominican Republic, but she is so much larger than life. I love all the glitz and glamour she manages to generate wherever she goes."
Ms. Boyd said she expects Suede to do good business, but she is more concerned with establishing a bench mark in the publishing culture as well.
"The expectation when it comes to black magazines is that they will be urban and that will be the end of it," she said. "There is supposed to be no taste level, no understanding of the runway aspects of fashion. We want to be fun and fashion correct."
As if I would pay for something I haven't had the chance to see yet!
I actually tend to use fashion books as inspiration. Give me new ideas to work with what I already have.
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