COLORS. A book about a magazine about the rest of the world Foreword by Francesco Bonami by Damiani

A BOOK ABOUT A MAGAZINE ABOUT THE REST OF THE WORLD

COLORS A Book About a Magazine About the Rest of the World Concept, Editing, Art Direction and Design Sebastiano Mastroeni, Alessandro Cavallini, Andrea Cavallini with Myriam El Assil

Bologna, Italy info@damianieditore.com www.damianieditore.com

Catena di Villorba (TV), Italy fabrica@fabrica.it www.fabrica.it

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical — including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system — without prior permission in writing from Fabrica.

Printed in July 2015 by Grafiche Damiani – Faenza Group, Italy. ISBN 978-88-6208-424-6

I N T R O 5

an introduction by Francesco Bonami

“ M A Y B E W E C O U L D I N T E R V I E W A N DY WA R H O L” 8

a n i n t e r v i e w w i t h O l i v i e r o To s c a n i

THE R E’S A PHOTO OF QU E E N E L I Z A B E T H W I T H B L AC K S K I N an inter view with Luciano Benetton

T H A T ’ S A M O R E 18

more amore

PL AC E S

they write songs about places like you (y o u h a v e r u i n e d m y l i f e)

B A N G ! 66

( b a n g , b a n g , b a n g !)

THE FUTURE IS TEN MINUTE AWAY I wanted to be an architect, but my parents said the

E LV I S 108

the Good, the Bad and the Elvis

W H E R E T H E H E L L IS M Y TA I L?

– ¡tienes pelo muy bonito! – ¿quien yo?

130

I WA N T T O B E L I E V E 154

o h m y G o d , i t’ s S u n d a y !

time to wake up and smell the regret

DR I N K I NG BU DDIES

d i d s o m e o n e s a y “ p r o p r i o c e z i o n e” ?

172

C O L O R S 198

is the new black

HERE IS THE CA KE

a t r i b u t e t o T i b o r’ s 13 t h i s s u e

225

LOOKING AT ART / GUARDARE L’ARTE

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“MAY BE W E COULD I NTERV IEW A N DY W A R H O L”

An interview with Oliviero Toscani

Let’s start at the beginning. Why did COLORS begin? Was it created at the beginning of the 1990s because it was thought something was missing or to shake up a dormant collective imagination? I really don’t know! I don’t do social stuﬀ ! COLORS took physical form in the ’90s but for me it had been created at least twenty years earlier. I’ve always wanted to have my own paper and I hope that one day that will come about. In short order, it became clear after some preliminary discussion that I might be able to do this with Benetton as they had a budget to publish a magazine and were looking to do so.

And more importantly, while other publications avoided printing my images because they felt my work was to provocative, Benetton was willing to take a chance on me – a chance which turned out to be Fabrica and COLORS. When I told Luciano (Benetton) that I would like to do something, I didn’t immediately suggest to him that we produce a paper, but rather an in-house publication that would talk about the employees, after work-hours activities, Formula 1, sports teams, the company! He immediately caught on that I had diﬀerent ideas and said , “Yes, let’s do it. For him too it was a sort of game and he needed to justify the investment required. And that’s also how Fabrica came about. They were created at the same time because my idea was to make Fabrica a publication, to take advantage of this great chance seeing that the money was already allocated for company communications. I have to say that

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Luciano realized that it could be an excellent form of communication, for the brand. Fabrica was created on the basis of cutting and sewing: that was how Francesca Mattei, my stylist presented it. Benetton and the sweaters… At Fabrica we research the materials and the styles… I knew it wouldn’t be like that; I knew what I wanted to do and what Fabrica should do. And I also knew very well how COLORS needed to be. I had very clear ideas. I wanted a magazine without any stars, without any celebrities and without any news. That was crazy enough already because all magazines feature celebrities, news and current affairs. I wanted current events but the kind of things we have no power over, issues that never go away. I wanted a paper that would be different every month, surprising and moving in form and substance, even if this went right against the publishing industry’s marketing logic. To begin with, my first idea was a title that “hitchhiked” on other papers. I said to Luciano: “Let’s do an issue this month for National Geographic, next month for La Repubblica and for Le Monde the month after”. We had a certain buying power and were able to give them a title to distribute for us, thus a magazine hitching on others. I had also thought that we could call it Cucù because cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds’ nests so their chicks are brought up by other birds. I liked this idea and stuck to it for a while. I also wanted it to be printed in different formats. Once like the New York Times, another time large like National Geographic. A title completely different from all the others, made up of intersections between pictures and text. This was the idea to sell it to a publisher. It couldn’t have a fi xed central office, it had to be stateless. The right city to start it in was New York where there are more possibilities available. We had everything going for us, we weren’t unknowns. I went to New York and in two weeks carried out a series of interviews with people who would be useful to making this magazine. I met friends and acquaintances from when I lived in the city and Carlo [Tunioli] gave me a hand. We were informed, we knew loads of interesting people, we knew who did what. Lou Reed would have been a cool person to collaborate with, but I had to work within the realms of realistic expectations. In the end it was Tibor Kalman who was chosen. I wasn’t particularly a fan of his graphics and his rather retro, Forties-Fifties design but what I liked about him was his intelligence. He couldn’t write or draw but my concern was to have someone with a head for being the editor-in-chief. He was quick and had a kind of off-kilter feel. My aspiration and vision for COLORS was to make it eccentrically intelligent, a little different from the idiotic marketing world. We began it in New York. It was very difficult at first because Tibor didn’t really know what he was doing. He arrived on the job from Interview, a very snobbish and hip magazine and kept saying “It has to be hip” but I kept on repeating

that I didn’t want a fashionable title. I wanted a different theme each issue. The theme was like an avenue into which different streets lead and each street had to bring news and interest based on the issue’s chosen theme. I didn’t want experienced journalists, I wanted youngsters who had just started out; I didn’t want anything that was like what was already known. For example, the captions of the photos couldn’t be descriptive of what was seen, for example, if there was a picture of someone playing football, we couldn’t write “Giovanni playing football”. Of course not. But something like “Giovanni would like to be an architect and instead he plays football”. This was a difficult process. For the first two months I had a hard time. I gave people a hard time, I was demanding, they hated me. I was in New York but I said to myself, “Now I’ll leave. I’ll give them time to settle”. I wasn’t interested in doing interviews. They came up with ideas for interviews, saying “Maybe we could interview Andy Warhol,” but I had no interest in doing that. People magazine does interviews. We had to interview people whom nobody knew. It had to be interesting for exactly that reason, we had to find things that didn’t make the news, we had to turn our things into news. All the odd, off-the-wall sports. We did a whole series of politically incorrect stuff, completely wrong by the standards of traditional journalism. We searched out photographs that nobody was publishing and news that wasn’t really news at all but that became news if COLORS published it. Like toilet-throwing in Scotland. I remember using it as an example. I arrived with this photo and everyone said “You’re crazy, a toilet-hurling contest?!” But it marked the start of a series of alternative articles. We didn’t want to make the world a better place, at least I never did. I didn’t want to demonstrate anything, all I wanted – egotistically – was to publish my own magazine. To see if what I had thought for years could be done. How was the writing organized? How much time did it take? How many people were there internally and how many outsiders sent in news? At the start there were three of us. It was the start of the Internet era and that helped us to no end in research. It may have been the first magazine created using the web but we weren’t even aware of that. I know that all the titles I read were the same, copying one another, and they really annoyed me. And then there was my personal part, my search for personal freedom. For me, being free means dedicating and chaining myself to a project. COLORS was a great project to free me from complexes…such as thinking I wasn’t intelligent enough, that I didn’t have the required talent, of not being able to do things, of being lazy. That’s the sort of stuff that ties us down. I always look for projects that allow me to free myself from complexes that

say I’m not able to do something. That’s why I have to do things. I don’t feel free when I’m lying on the beach in the sun, on the contrary. If I’m not busy, I’m not free. For me work is a liberation. COLORS arose from the combination of all these things, some of which were very human and personal. At the start you said that lots of magazines didn’t publish your photographs. Why not? Because they didn’t like the condom, they didn’t like the child being born, they didn’t like the priest kissing the nun, they didn’t like the crosses in the war cemetery…

models, like all the other fashion brands do. It was admired because it had the courage to handle its communications in a completely diﬀerent way from the others. COLORS fell into that kind of vision. We weren’t producing a commercial magazine. COLORS was intriguing and also intimidating but everyone had it on their table. All the people ahead of the curve read COLORS. I went to a publisher’s to sell the issue on death, they thought I was crazy! A magazine that talks about death! But are you all immortal? I asked them. This is the only thing that is certain about our lives. That was the kind of thing that happened when I was in contact with the real publishing world.

But that was primarily abroad, not nationally. I had the great chance at Benetton to deal directly with Luciano; I could go ahead with my projects before having to have his agreement. I always tried to work like that. I had the space to experiment without knowing if the things I was doing would work. For this you need an enlightened entrepreneur. An artist is only free when he shows his client that he can make him rich. By that I don’t mean only rich financially. I believe that at Benetton they were also enriched culturally, ethically and humanly; I too was enriched. It was a collective enrichment. Some clients only think of the money side, only believe in profits. But there are those who understand that enrichment also comes in other forms: power, prestige, culture and modernity. Benetton would never have won any admiration if it had just used testimonials or top

How did an issue of COLORS come about? Who gave the input? Who chose the theme? I wrote many of the editorials. There was nothing programmed. My son Rocco recently reminded me of a story during the early issues of COLORS. We were in Paris to do some photos for the first issue of COLORS on AIDS. I said to Tibor: “Let’s go to my place in Tuscany by car. That way, travelling and looking at the countryside between Paris and Tuscany we will have time to discuss the magazine. It’ll do us good.” We left in an enormous Mercedes with my son sitting behind us and I remember that for the whole journey Tibor and I argued incessantly, about ideas and how the magazine should be done. Of course, with an American I had to speak English as even the notion of other languages is foreign to them. When he pretended he didn’t understand [my Italian], I said to Tibor:

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“Learn Italian, idiot, I’m paying you with Italian money”. We’d sing to Bob Dylan together, argue some more, stop to eat Aligot and drink Pinot Nero, and on it went. Publishers who produce magazines in the normal way have managers in ties and jackets who use market research. We do the complete opposite. What was the best issue of COLORS? The one on war because it was the deepest, the most structured. I was finally able to explain that war was nothing but a form of communication. There was the Gulf War on and I said: “But look at these people, they want to communicate but they’re illiterate. So they drop bombs”. But then all wars are like that. That’s the time that Alex Marashan arrived on the scene, the best writer at COLORS. A Californian who had just finished at Harvard and with whom I still work. We were in Rome because I wanted to change the editing location every two or three years. I didn’t plan anything. That’s how it was at COLORS. That’s how I do everything, I’m a situationist. We were in Rome and were looking for writers. I put an ad in a rag for foreign students and found Alex Marashan. He had applied to the ten best universities in America and been accepted by all of them. He’d studied Sociology and History of Art at Harvard, he was 24. “That’s our man”, I said to Tibor. What did he have over the others? I looked him in the eye! Intelligent! We still work together. Then Tibor got ill and didn’t want to come to Paris. He went back to the States. And so Alex took his place as editor-in-chief, just in time for the issue on war, which was especially important to me. It was very interesting to analyze communication through war… It’s its most violent means of expression. Among other things, war is always fashionable, it never changes. It was a fantastic issue, with a great deal to say. If you don’t follow fashion, you’re always fashionable, if you don’t follow the news, you’re always topical. How long did it take to produce an issue? Not long and a lot. For me the important thing was that the concept underlying the theme should be understood – the translation of the concept and its many possibilities. There were all kinds of discussions… What was always characteristic of COLORS was that it said what nobody wanted to say or hear: it said what was taboo. It pushed in our faces what we didn’t want to see or say because it was frightening. Like the model for the Nolita campaign (by Oliviero Toscani), even if it has nothing

to do with COLORS, and her way of seeing life. Do you think that approach is still topical? Do you ever ask yourself that? I’m not interested in being topical. As I said before, I’m a situationist. I see things and I want to document them. There’s no such thing as a shocking photograph. Or a shocking image or text. A photograph records the facts around us. I’m not here as a benefactor. I’m here to record what I see. There are those who not only look but also see; there are those who don’t want to know or see, and who will come to see it later. An artist is someone who expresses what he sees and feels. Those who look for ideas don’t see and therefore don’t have ideas. When you have no creativity, ok, then go look for ideas. Creativity is a consequence, someone might say, “Look, that guy is really creative”. Anyone who calls himself creative is a fool and is certainly not creative at all. The only creatives are women, because they’re able to make babies. We men create nothing. Women are creators, we men have this complex of having to be creative and so are condemned to be artists. It’s an instinct. It’s energy. If you had to do an issue of COLORS now, what theme would you choose? Immortality. Immortality will be useful to those who come after us. After I’m dead I won’t care anymore. Immortality is only of interest to those who are alive. Were there any magazines in the ’80s or ’90s that inspired you, however much COLORS was a pioneer? Time, the photographs in Life in the ’50s, Twen, Nova, Playboy where there were beautiful women but also excellent articles and interviews. I remember the one with Fidel Castro. Playboy combined intellectuality, beauty and, of course, sexuality. Fantastic! Today what magazines do you read? Only dailies in diﬀerent languages – English, French, and German. I don’t read magazines or books. I like newspapers, which are necessities for me. They’re like the air. I’d like to produce a newspaper based on the news but I wouldn’t organize it like a typical paper. I wouldn’t have sections dedicated to foreign news, human interest news, politics, and so on. I’d base it on contrasting services, with beauty, war, design, culture, etc. Did the sales of COLORS increase over the years and with it the feedback from the buyers? We had a global public, we’d grown in the world. Although we had a distribution of 50 copies per shop, there were some where youngsters would

wait outside for the new issue, where the shops displayed it like a flag. Then there were shops that left it still bundled in plastic in the toilet because they didn’t want to be contaminated by absurd themes and unconventional news. They were scared of COLORS. It embarrassed them. That was COLORS for you. Today is there any photographer or artist you think could carry on a project as pioneering as COLORS was in the early ’90s? Certainly, only that no one teaches them not to be frightened of being frightened. If you do something without being frightened, it’ll never be interesting or good. Everyone wants to be sure of what they’re doing. Any really

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interesting idea simply can’t be safe. I did COLORS with my fingers crossed. Did Benetton give you carte blanche with COLORS? They had no idea of what I was doing. Not even I knew. It was like discovering America. I never have carte blanche. I need limits and diﬃculties to overcome. Anyway, I could never have done it alone, I exploited the talents of others. Those who work with me wonder why I always ask more of them. I ask what others think impossible but then they realize that much of the impossible is actually possible and this gives everyone a great deal of satisfaction! I’ve never done anything just to sell, I do things because they’re interesting.

THERE’S A PHOTO OF QUEEN ELIZABETH WITH B L AC K S K I N An interview with Luciano Benetton

What were some of issues that compelled you to finance a project such as COLORS? Our goal was to create a magazine that was entirely different. At that time, Internet didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t exist and our philosophy of communication led us to seek out new avenues that would assure us of reaching the highest number of young people around the globe. Why did you bring in Oliviero Toscani as the founder of this ambitious and pioneering project? Tell us how you met and how COLORS took shape.

I started working with Oliviero in 1982 on the Benetton advertising campaign. We started with images of young men and women of all different nationalities, standing together and smiling. Then we started working with social issues linked to current events: from wars to illness, from environmental issues to immigration, from ethnic diversity to religious differences. The ďŹ rst issue of COLORS was published in 1991. Its cover photo was one of the most controversial campaigns done by Benetton: the newborn Giusy. COLORS was a pretext for following the debate that our campaigns sparked in countries around the world. It was published in four languages and distributed in 40 countries. Do you think that COLORS had an impact on the collective

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imagination? Do you think it helped people talk about difficult issues and made people reflect on the themes it covered, such as religion and war? I definitely think so. COLORS was ahead of its time because it fed off written and visual contributions from a network of young collaborators around the globe. It was its own kind of social network, ante litteram. It was a way of sharing and participating in ideas that preceded the Internet. This is why the themes it covered triggered debate and got attention. The second cover issue shot showed the merchant ship Viora full of immigrants – also one of the Benetton campaign ads. The title of the issue was “Immigration,” and it became the key theme. From the fourth issue onwards the magazine focused on single themes: Race, Street, Ecology, AIDS, Religion, Refugee, Gypsy, Volunteers. In addition to financing the project, what other role did you provide for COLORS? Did you suggest themes that you wanted to see people face and dissect? The first editor-in-chief together with Oliviero Toscani on COLORS was Tibor Kalman, an American graphic designer of Hungarian origin. Tibor was famous in the States but practically unknown in Italy, except by fans of the Talking Heads, for whom he designed the album cover,“Remain in Light.” I never asked them to cover specific themes, but I did ask them to cover universal issues so the magazine gained the widest reach possible. COLORS is a magazine that “talks about the rest of the world.” Do you still think that talking about different cultures, religions, and languages is a key to cultural – and even financial – evolution? I think that today, more than ever, it is necessary to bring cultures together and promote a shared consciousness. The dramatic news that reaches us every day about religious wars, ethnic wars and wars driven by economic interests demonstrates that we still have a long way to go. We know now that our model is not the only one worth exporting, and we know that culture, art, and awareness can bring people closer together. The young, creative team of COLORS often achieved this. What were the major strengths of COLORS that allowed it to become a kind of cultural seismograph,

creating publishing and design concepts that are still in use today? COLORS was a “relativistic” magazine in a period when relativism was spoken about only in academic circles – and deﬁnitely not on the front pages of newspapers. COLORS saw all cultures as having equal value, where all differences were important, and where all were taken into consideration. Was the magazine a source of inspiration for the clothing line of Benetton or vice versa? I would have to say no, it was not, even though COLORS also looked playfully and irreverently at contemporary topics such as fashion, lifestyle, shopping, travel, food. Which issue is your favorite and why? I have several. One is “Race.” It’s the one dedicated to ethnicity, the one where there’s a photo of Queen Elizabeth with black skin. The theme of ethnicities, differences, and faraway cultures has always fascinated me; this curiosity is at the heart of the enthusiasm that compels me to travel. Is there a project that you would like to be involved in today that can still provoke people to think about contemporary emergencies? As I already mentioned, I believe that art and culture are powerful tools that lead towards integration, and away from belligerence. If our societies were built around artists, there would be no war. I started a project called “Imago Mundi” – it’s a sort of world map of contemporary art in 10x12 format. By the end of 2015, one hundred countries will be involved in this project and it will include the work of more than 20,000 artists, both famous and emerging ones. We organize exhibits for them, we design catalogs, and we created the portal www.imagomundiart.com It is a non-proﬁt organization overseen by the Benetton Foundation. Our goal is to bring together the highest number of artists and countries, from near and far, and together display an ideal, borderless, frontier-less world that shows all the signs of the most extraordinary cultures.

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THAT’S AMORE more amore

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