Luis Venegas. Portrait: Thomas Giddings.

fashion
1/5/2010

Candy, darling...


by Jefferson Hack


When Luis Venegas, the Madrid-based magazine editor, launched Candy, the first limited-edition issue sold out within days. Described as the world's 'first transversal style magazine', the publication features a high-gloss blur of fashion, gender and sexuality, alongside the same playful wit that many readers will recognise from Venegas' previous magazines, Fanzine 137 and EY! Magateen.


The beautifully enigmatic Miss Lucy Worrall stares out from the cover of the first issue, a vision in scarlet lipstick and Chanel pearls. Who's that girl? Actually, that would be British male model Luke Worrall, transformed into a modern-day Marilyn Monroe for the lens of Brett Lloyd. Inside, the magazine profiles Rodarte's estimable Mulleavy sisters, delves into the Christian Lacroix archive, and showcases the photography of Terry Richardson and Bruce Weber, among others. Like all the best magazines, Candy also serves as a handbook for modern living, offering make-up masterclasses and practical advice for those dreaming of attaining the glamorous life. 

Entirely appropriate for such a splashy, colourful venture, the magazine's London launch party was riotous and celebratory. The evening attracted a mix of the fashionably curious, the curiously fashionable, and revellers who simply turned up to experience Venegas' legendary hosting skills. He didn't disappoint, marking the occasion by arriving in the guise of Anna Wintour and playing records into the early hours as part of a turntable two-hander alongside his very own Grace Coddington (as channeled by close friend Andres Borque).

To celebrate the magazine's success, Luis recently met up with Jefferson Hack (a man who knows a thing or two about magazine publishing himself), for an exclusive Ponystep interview. 



LV: Hola!

JH: Hola! Tell me about a day in the life of Luis Venegas; what time did you get up, what was your first meeting?

LV: Well, I met Madonna today (laughter). I wake up at about half past eight, then I have breakfast and then of course I get a shower and I start working and answering emails. And then, usually around 12, I go out to go to my favourite newsstand in Madrid, to check if there are some new magazines.

JH: You make it sound so leisurely! I’m sure your life is more hectic than you are making out. So where is home?

LV: My home is Madrid.

JH: And how long have you been running your club night in Barcelona?

LV: Now it's one year.

JH: Do you think that club culture and publishing go hand in hand?

LV: Not always, it depends on the magazine.

JH: So what’s your connection to it?

LV: Because of the fun! If I wasn’t doing magazines, I would like to be a performer. I really love to be in front of a group of people and to entertain them. It’s Andres Borque and me. We not only DJ, we have a microphone so we sing songs like ‘The Way We Were’ by Barbra Streisand and I can get out from the DJ booth to dance with people and then he can do the same thing back.

JH: What has the day been like for your new magazine Candy? What’s happened today in the life of Candy?

LV: It has been something really moving for me actually. One of my favourite places to buy magazines in Barcelona is Las Ramblas. Suddenly, I saw they had Candy magazine. The shop was closed but in the window the magazine that was next to Candy was Hola! magazine, you know, Hello! magazine? And for me it was so great to see. Maybe it sounds stupid, but Hola! is my favourite magazine and has been for a long, long time. And to see Candy, with Luke Worrall as a transvestite close to the cover of Hola!, it was a real moment for me. One of the most surprising things was that I got a call from a girl called Aliqua, and she was from the Wendy Williams show, a talk show on the Fox Channel, and she said they would love to talk about Candy magazine on the show. She was like, ‘And who is this girl?’ Well, actually this is Luke Worrall!

JH: Well, you are tapping into something very powerful aren’t you? You are tapping into a taboo, as well as a shift in cultural attitudes towards sex and identity and you’ve really taken this culture, this subculture and have put a fashion and a high-gloss lens on it. I was interested in your approach to packaging and making this magazine, and why it ended up looking the way it was.

LV: As you say, it has been a subculture for a long time, but for me, it is like the hardest culture; it’s like people doing the best they can to become themselves. And I think that attitude really deserves some better recognition. At the very beginning, I had the idea of making the typical magazine with staples or whatever, but then I felt that no, it deserves to be glossy and flash, and flamboyant and the best I can do, and it has to shine. I remember when we started working on the graphics with the designer they were too colourful, just too much. I felt that they were maybe a little too obvious and everything that we were thinking, we had to do the opposite. The references have to be as elegant as we can.

JH: I think that Candy is the most original and well-presented debut magazine for a really long time, and what I wanted to do is hear your thinking behind choosing Luke and the art direction of the cover story. You could have put a transvestite on the cover, you could have put a transsexual on the cover, you could have done many things with the cover. Why did you end up doing it the way you did?

LV: Firstly I wanted to have a boy, a straight guy, that everybody knows is straight because he has a relationship with a celebrity and is now a celebrity himself. He is a male model and I love that, because everything is possible and he wasn’t afraid to do this. He was also very good for the magazine, because this is not something only for the subculture; this is for people who are into fashion and for people who want to be surprised and not afraid to try things and to have fun and to enjoy life. I thought he had a Marilyn Monroe inside, a contemporary Marilyn Monroe, that blonde, silly girl.

JH: If you had to be any girl in the world who would you be?

LV: I think it would have to be Lourdes, Madonna’s daughter. I see something in her like she is going to be the next Liza Minnelli, I see Madonna as the next Judy Garland, and Lourdes as the next Liza Minnelli!

JH: Thierry Mugler was your first introduction into fashion. What did you learn most during your time there?

LV: It was December 1996. It was the first time I ever took a plane, and the whole experience was amazing from the very beginning. So, once in Paris, this friend of mine and I were in charge of the gloves at one of the first haute couture shows that Mr. Mugler ever did. I remember that it was the collection inspired by insects and it was really amazing. It was an internship, but I never made coffee for anyone! It was really incredible to be involved in the creative process, and I think this was really brave, because we were only in the second year of our degree, and it was like wow, they really trust us!

JH: Tell me about the first issue of Fanzine137. What’s your most lasting memory of receiving that first issue, and the contents of that first issue?

LV: I still love to look at that issue. I had this idea of having a magazine of my own, and I wanted to do it big - at the time I was working with Sybilla, a fashion designer that I had loved since I was a child. She told me, "You don’t need to start doing a big thing you can do it little by little". So, I thought, "Yes, maybe I can start being by myself". So, things started to happen, and I wanted some advertisers to make people feel as though it wasn’t just some fashion student rag.

JH: But you wanted to present it as professionally as possible, right?

LV: Of course. So, I needed to have advertising for it to be taken seriously as a real magazine. At the time, five years ago  Hedi Slimane was doing great things at Dior Homme and I thought they were the people who would understand the project. To my surprise, they told me to call back because they wanted to see the project and the magazine and I had a meeting with Hedi Slimane. What I showed him was just an envelope with some photocopies, it wasn’t even a PDF and I don’t know what he saw in that, but he decided to help me  make it happen. On the back cover of all the issues there was a Dior Homme advertisement and I will always be really grateful to him for doing that. It was the beginning of people giving credit to my project.

JH: I could talk to you all day long Luis, because your stories are so fantastic and because they come from such a humble place. It seems as if your life is just one long accident but somehow you have always turned these humble moments and these chance encounters into these wonderful, beautiful results. Did you always know you were going to work in magazines? Did you feel as though you were going to be a publisher?

LV: No, not really. I have always had a great love for magazines, and for printed paper in many different ways.

JH: Do you have hundreds of magazines?

LV: That’s me! I have Italian Vogue's from 1988, and every single issue since, and the same for American Vogue.

JH: You probably have a bigger magazine collection than Gallagher’s!

LV: I love that place! And I love Michael Gallagher. When they ask me, ‘What is your favourite shop in the world?’, that is the first place for me. I like to collect all those press books. I would never throw anything away like that because that’s history, and especially for the fanzine and for Candy now too, I love to look at the archives. So, I try to lookat them in a different way, in a contemporary way and to show people how relevant things from 20 or 30 years ago are and remain as powerful and as great as they were before.

JH: I’m glad you said that, because a big part of your signature style is to look back and recontextualise archive that is relevant to contemporary culture. It is something that I do a lot in my publications and you do it in your own way in your's. We are all in a cultural lineage, your magazines exist and my magazines exist because of what has come before. You know, Candy wouldn’t exist as a magazine if it wasn’t for the pioneering work of other publishers and other photographers. If you could be an editor of any magazine for the day. who would you want to swap with?

LV: You know, I love Vogue magazine, so from the past I would love to be Diana Vreeland, someone who had a mind full of fantasy. At the time when Vogue was more about dreaming and I think that was great. She helped a lot to build the image of Vogue as a magazine to dream. And today, I would love to be Anna Wintour, just for a day.

JH: Well, I think you were Anna Wintour for a night, right?

LV: Yeah, and I had my own Grace Coddington with me to DJ.

JH: This was for your launch party for Candy, right?

LV: Yeah, at the Candy party it was like, play the fantasy…


http://www.byluisvenegas.com/

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