Radical, tolerant, enquiring, pro-consumer, lid-off, helpful. It’ll be no-holds-barred, without being noisy. It should have bite without malice.
Wave-of-the-future type stuff, when possible. Whiff of scandal..
. Serious. Non-expert.
Funny.” In early 1964, this was future editor vision for the planned . The project was a long-ruminated riposte to the , which had launched its “Colour Section” in February 1962 with an in-your-face graphic cover of Jean Shrimpton wearing Mary Quant, photographed by David Bailey: your early 1960s cool bingo card almost filled before you had even turned the first page.
It was a revolutionary break with the postwar era of newsprint rationing, when papers ran only two or three pictures a week. Michael Davie wanted the magazine to have a ‘bias towards the young’ and ‘cater somewhat more for women than men’ So how would the respond? I headed to the Kings Place archive – a place I know well after two years on the regular “ slot – to try to find out. In a box of testy typed memos about staffers’ expenses (“Does he need to take people to lunch on Mondays when facilities are available here?”), cover complaints (“The bodybuilding woman seems revolting to me”) and features suggestions probably better consigned to the dustbin of history (“The dying art of stamp collecting”), I found a few clues.
In a February 1964 memo headed “SECRET”, editor David Astor set out some initial thoughts, the fruit of two years studying the .