Today we visited Sonoma Publishing. Among many other magazines, including National Geographic, Sonoma produces that Czech version of Marie Claire magazine. http://www.marieclaire.cz/ We were given an extremely generous tour and description of the kind of work that goes into making a magazine such as this and the challenges that the rather small staff of Marie Claire faces as they try to position a global brand in this unique market. It occurred to me that this was probably the most access that any of us had had into the behind the scenes production processes of the magazine industry. Even in my music career I had not gotten this level of exposure to the various facets of magazine production. It was interesting and a little disorienting that we were listening to Sonoma employees from Prague, The U.K., and The U.S. explain in English how they produce a French magazine for a Czech audience.
As we looked at photo shoot prints, glossy magazine covers and glamorous wardrobe racks, dark eye-shadowed eyes of Czech models glared alluringly back at us. I felt conflicted. Although I am a Hip-Hop artist and fashion is certainly an important part of Hip-Hop culture, I’ve always been notoriously out of sync with and a little suspicious of the fashion world.
One of the things that I struggled with was trying to understand the meaning of Czech fashion in this environment. Fashion designs and designers from countries such as France and Italy hold certain sway over what is considered fashionable. Fashion magazines across the globe were under some pressure to stay relevant to these dominant trends. Simultaneously we learned that terms such as “Fearful,” boring”, “unimaginative”, or “behind the times” are terms are sometimes applied to Czech designers. In this context, magazines like Marie Claire must carefully negotiate a variety of interests. They must simultaneously negotiate the needs of the French headquarters, Czech readers, advertisers, local and foreign designers. But the terms “needs” is a loaded term that needs to be unpacked more. It can stand for wants, expectations, comfort zones, formulae, requirements, guidelines, or combinations of all of the above. But what it boils down to is that for magazines or photographers that want to support Czech designers this might often mean advising them to incorporate French or Italian aesthetics. This in turn invites both the producers of the magazine and its readers to experience themselves as more fashionable when they ” improve” their fashion sense by muting their local fashion sensibilities or those rooted in the specific experiences of Czech people. Of course this process is complex. The Marie Claire staff displayed a staggering literacy with these issues and they each approached these problems from different angles. There is much more to be said here but ultimately it was interesting to see how the meaning of Czech fashion winds up being mediated through corporate “needs” but even more intimately through aesthetic sensibilities of the a variety of production related actors not the least of whom are the readers themselves.
Location: Prague