Here is where Tyler Brûlé comes into the picture. This is the man who essentially picks up where Richard Floridaa drops it. Brûlé is not only aware of the ’spikiness’ of the world today and of the intense condensation of creativity in some of its select spots. Unlike Florida who forsakes his important premises and volunteers to limit his findings to the US (a place that can easily be questioned as a sole source of innovation today), Brûlé identifies the places where creativity thrives. And then he spend all his time circulating between these places and reporting on them.
No wonder, his itinerary does not go through North America very often. He much prefers touching down in Tokyo, Copenhagen, Seoul, Zurich, or Sydney. A native of far away Canadian prairies, Brûlé is a man of inexhaustible determination and commitment to propagating the lifestyle that he has discovered for himself and has made a selling point for others. He still mostly goes by the fame of having founded Wallpaper, the great design magazine that is still better known than his more recent project, Monocle.
I do not know why he has left Wallpaper and has come to develop other projects, but Brûlé is now mostly focused on projects that promote the creative lifestyle and the places that people like Florida miss out on. He tried a short-lived TV show (I believe it was on BBC TV 4) and is now mostly visible through ventures like Monocle magazine (and a recent shop in London and other locations), and his writing for the Financial Times.
Brûlé writes a weekly column for Saturday’s Lifestyle section of the Financial Times, and has been doing so for about two years now. The topics are somewhat repetitive and reading his writing week after week gives the feeling of monotony and, ultimately, boredom. But what he talks about is, in principle, exciting to me: airports, design, modern architecture, user-friendly cities, comfortable travel, nice hotels, luxury shopping, global creativity. He is often quite critical of the country (England) and the city (London) where he is primarily based. This came across particularly clearly in a column entitled Band Aid’s Won’t Save Britain (18 July 2008), a piece which I found truly enjoyable as it was summarizing precisely what people like myself and friends think of this country’s misguided self-esteem and antiquated management styles. But, I am in the minority here, as usual. Brûlé’s ‘rants’ , especially when they get to praising non-Western locations and to criticizing the metropolitan hubs of the West (as it were, untouchable by default), routinely trigger angry (and sometimes approving) reactions from readers on the letter pages of the FT, as well as in the blogosphere or other media. Like this blog post, for example, which simply invites him to shut up.
Monocle magazine is Brûlé’s main undertaking at the moment. I have been subscribing for a year now, and feel I can say a few things about it ( my 14 year-old son, who is interested in style matters, reads it with great pleasure). I will not subscribe for the next period, though, as I did not think it was value for money: you see, while the magazine costs £5 if purchased in a shop, the subscription costs you £75 for 10 issues. I was curious to see what could possibly justify the 50% increase in price when subscribing, as the only identified extra benefit was access to the web-site. And now, after having had access to the web-site for a year, I do not think it is worth it, as even though the web-site is nice, there isn’t anything much on it to make me feel I have got my money’s worth. And I do not see the point paying for the chance to watch all sorts of promotional videos for which the publishers already have been paid by the promoter. Normally, subscriptions are cheaper than purchasing a magazine in a shop. Reversing this and making the subscription more expensive than a shop purchase is certainly a cunning approach to marketing, and I would be curious to find out if it has worked, in principle. I am sure that there are people out there who would feel nice to know that they are simply taking up the chance to spend more when they could spend less. I do not belong to this group, however.
Monocle the magazine engages in diverse promotion of a cosmopolitan yappy lifestyle for those who have good taste and who know that the nicest places to be are not the ones that Florida is discussing in his book but are more likely to be found today around Osaka or Stockholm. In line with the current manga-craze, the magazine has commissioned its own series, Kita Koga, which features the adventures of a young cross-breed advernturer, Niels Watanabe, and which is executed by a Japanese cartoonist and attached to each issue of the magazine (a collector’s item, in other words). Monocle features a range of articles on global cities, from Beirouth to Reykiavik, and never limits its worldview between the East and the West Coast. What I like about the magazine is its great vision of the world as a globalized place where a variety of people (and not only Americans) exist and spend their lives, its concern with livability and its daring encouragement of truly creative and diverse lifestyle choices, its excellent advertising and style trends features, its competence in assessing important aspects of modern travel, and, in general, its relentless concern with issues of the quality of life in the modern globalized age. What I do not like about Monocle is the repetitiveness of its endless lists (it feels like crushing monotony after some time), the tiny font size used, and the subscription price.
But even though I am dropping my subscription and will probably not continue following this publications, I cannot stop admiring Brûlé’s inventive entrepreneurship and his commitment to promoting his vision of the lifestyle of the creative classes (precisely the area where Florida fails so badly). Monocle is also used as a platform for selling stuff which is of the style and quality personally approved by the man in charge. There is an on-line shop, and there is a shop in London’s Marylebone, featuring items developed in partnerships with high brow brands such as Comme des Garçons (Japan/France) or Valextra (Italy), largely reflecting the nature of Brûlé’s global trendspotting travails. You can buy a small selection of high quality items at extremely high prices: the target audience here is clearly yappies with a good style sense. (It would be interesting to see if the venture will survive beyond the current financial downturn, provided we have already seen predictions that services that rely on the same clientele, like the Bloomberg media empire, may be severely affected soon). What I find particularly interesting is this ‘interdisciplinary’ entrepreneurship of sorts, which spans media (magazine, web-site with videos, on-line shop), advertising (some of the best advertising can be seen on the pages of this magazine), events (they have branched out in some conference organizing lately), and retail.
© Dina Iordanova
7 February 2009
As a lover of modern architecture, the dosage of exposure to wonderfully landscaped and designed modern spaces was a feature that defined my recent visit to Columbus, Ohio, as a really enjoyable trip. Led by a stereotypically dismissive pre-set attitude to the Midwest, I had not set my expectations very high, so I was in for a nice surprise. The hotel on the edge of campus, Blackwell Inn, was completely emancipated from the American kitsch that you would normally see at any other hotel in mid-America. The geometry of the pathways and landscaped grass rectangles that I was seeing through my room window was incredibly stylish, and so were the shapes of the new dark brick buildings that framed it. Most of all, I was truly thrilled to realise that the talk which I had come to give, was to take place in the main auditorium of the Wexner Centre for the Arts (pictured), an award-winning modern design achievement by architect and philosopher Peter Eisenman, the man who created the unevenly-leveled blocks of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. It was a great experience in architectural discovery, as I did not know what to expect, so I was truly pleasantly surprised. It reminded me to an experience more than a decade ago when a visit for a talk to Minneapolis took me to the modern art museum there, on the Mississippi river, and provided my first encounter with the architectural style of Frank Gehry. This was at a time when Gehry was not as widely known as he is today, even before the unveiling of his museum in Bilbao (and many other structures that he did later on). It was some sort of design revelation for me. Same with the Wexner.
This second photograph shows the interior of the museum, where the reception after the talk took place. To the left is the entrance to the large room which is used for talks and screenings (that night they also screened Andrzej Wajda’s deeply personal Katyn). My talk was entitled ‘History for Losers: Cultural Historiography and Popular Culture in the ‘New’ Europe’. It was given as an opening keynote for the Slavic conference that the Centre for Slavic and East European Studies here organised. Unfortunately, I could not stay on for the conference that was to follow, as I was headed back already the next sunny morning, after a nice walk around the campus. The flight to Newark was great, as the cloudless sky allowed for incredibly clear views over the Great Lakes and then, descending into New Jersey, toward the Manhattan skyline as well as the Statue of Liberty (which one cannot see as easily, normally). In spite the suppressed irritation I was harboring on entry to the US, after having had to fill out scores of forms that no one seemed to have checked as they were asking me all over again for the same details, in addition to taking my fingerprints, I was leaving in a good mood. And yes, to be honest, passing the US immigration took less than ten minutes now (in comparison, two-three years ago it was more like an hour).