The Magazine Whisperer

From time to time, Baron has also had to deflect some criticism in publishing circles that Interview under his leadership is gorgeous, while being somewhat unreadable. For display type, he favors giant capital letters that are crammed together. The articles often feature a font so small even a teenager with 20/20 could have trouble reading them. “I’m very aware of this,” says Baron. “It’s possible it’s a little bit harder to read. But you get so much more. You get the beauty, you get organization, and you get an experience that you would not get if I made it totally legible.”

“Even the photographers who aren’t locked up have been locked up,” Baron says of Interview. “People are worried that if they work for us, they’re not going to work for Vogue.

If Baron doesn’t seem overly concerned with the words in his magazine, that might be because he’s a visual person who comes as much from an advertising sensibility as an editorial one. After growing up in Paris (where his father was a magazine art director), he moved to New York in the early 1980s and got a job as an assistant art director at GQ. He moved from there to an ill-fated startup called New York Woman, then took over at Italian Vogue and began doing Barneys’ groundbreaking ad campaigns with the photographer Steven Meisel and models Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell.

Since then, he’s been known for his prodigious use of white space (there's an almost arctic chill to everything he designs) and a tendency to align himself with projects that pushed sexual boundaries. The Calvin Klein “kiddie porn” spread? That would be one of his most famous campaigns. Madonna’s Sex book? He did the art direction. Baron’s said to be working on another coffee table book with the singer now—a massive retrospective of the queen of reinvention as photographed over the years by everyone from Herb Ritts to Steven Klein. “I’m not sure I’m supposed to talk about it yet,” he says, with characteristic self-restraint.

Despite having worked in fashion for decades, Baron purports to be a little flummoxed by the reaction some of his work gets here in the United States. In 2008, a Calvin Klein ad with a naked Eva Mendes was banned from U.S. television. A little while later, the company also generated controversy with a billboard that hinted at group sex. “Ten years ago, it was easier to do something than it is today,” Baron says. “People get offended by imagery way more than they used to. The Eva Mendes commercial I did? Honestly, you look at it and it’s not offensive at all. But they got letters and complaints. ‘Overtly sexual’ is what they called it. This country has become quite uptight. It’s, like, come on. I know the '60s are far away, but in Europe the same image doesn’t even get mentioned. They don’t care.”

Much as Baron doesn’t seem to care about the church-state divide between advertising and editing, he has even stepped behind the lens and done some fashion photography. Given that it’s basically a hobby for him, the results have been very well received. The late New York Times fashion critic Amy Spindler called his 2000 “Primal Scream” spread in W her favorite fashion editorial of the year. In the most recent issue of Interview, Baron photographed polo player and Ralph Lauren model Nacho Figueras, who then sits for a Q & A with the publication’s polo-playing owner Peter Brant. Says Bob Colacello, a former editor of Interview and friend of the Brants: “I told Peter he should put Nacho on the cover because he’s glamorous and it will get them a lot of Ralph Lauren advertising.” In the end, Baron apparently decided just to go with an inside spread, though it seems unlikely anyone had to twist his arm to do the shoot. Asked what brand he’d most like to work with but hasn’t yet, he says simply, “Ralph Lauren.”

Perhaps for his next act.

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Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.

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