About Details

Details

Details was an American men's magazine published in New York City, New York, that lived two distinct lives. It began in 1982 as an independent downtown culture magazine chronicling Manhattan nightlife, art, fashion and music, and it ended in 2015 as a glossy monthly men's fashion and lifestyle title published by Condé Nast. Across more than three decades it moved from hand-distributed copies in nightclubs to national circulation of more than 450,000, while retaining a reputation for sharp photography, irreverent cultural reporting and an editorial voice that treated men's style as part of a wider social identity rather than as shopping advice alone.

Although fashion and lifestyle were its core, Details also published reporting on politics and social issues, long-form profiles, humour and, in the late 1990s, pioneering work in comics journalism. Its final print issue was dated December 2015 / January 2016, after Condé Nast announced in November 2015 that publication would cease. The website continued briefly before transitioning toward GQ Style. This profile traces the magazine from its low-budget founding to its corporate relaunches and its eventual closure.

Founding in downtown New York in 1982

Details was founded in 1982 by Annie Flanders, a former fashion editor who had overseen the style pages of the SoHo Weekly News. When that alternative weekly folded in 1982, Flanders gathered former colleagues to create a new publication. The founding circle included writer Stephen Saban, art director Lesley Vinson, Ronnie Cooke, Megan Haungs and photographer Bill Cunningham, who documented New York street fashion and nightlife. Flanders financed the launch with a small sum from her own savings, reported in her obituary coverage as about $6,000, and the early operation was famously improvised, with staff mailing parties to stuff envelopes for distribution.

The first covers set the tone: stark black-and-white portrait photography and a title treatment designed to look carved in stone. Initial circulation was about 10,000, and many copies were given away through nightclubs, whose guest lists supplied names for free distribution in exchange for advertising. The magazine described itself in spirit as a party in print, covering the clubs, galleries, designers and performers of downtown Manhattan at a moment when SoHo and the East Village were reshaping American art and fashion. That scene reporting, rather than conventional menswear service journalism, was what first made Details noticed.

Ownership changes in the 1980s

The independent magazine was financially fragile. In 1984, to avert bankruptcy, Flanders sold a controlling interest for $300,000 to a British publisher. That owner sold the title on in mid-1987 to a New York entrepreneur. In 1988 investor Alan Patricof bought the magazine, and a year later Condé Nast acquired it for about $2 million. Each transfer shifted the magazine a little further from a downtown scene sheet toward a national consumer title, while keeping New York as its base and its subject.

Under Condé Nast, part of Advance Publications, Details gained the production values, advertiser access and distribution of a major publisher. Flanders remained associated with the magazine she founded until 1989, departing as the title entered the 1990s. The Condé Nast purchase in 1988 is sometimes dated to the acquisition agreement and sometimes to the completed transaction the following year, but the sequence is consistent across accounts: Patricof first, then Condé Nast, which transformed the irreverent downtown chronicle into a young men's fashion and lifestyle magazine for a national audience.

The James Truman era and the 1990s magazine

In 1990 S. I. Newhouse Jr. moved James Truman from American Vogue, where Anna Wintour had hired him as features editor in 1988, to edit Details. Truman's 1990s Details blended fashion editorials with music, film, politics and frank writing about sex and relationships. A sex column by Anka Radakovich ran from 1990 to 1999 and became one of its best-known regular features. Contributors in this period included Augusten Burroughs, Michael Chabon and Blake Nelson, alongside fashion and street photography that preserved a link to the Flanders years, notably Bill Cunningham's work, which continued into 1990.

The magazine also invested in music. From 1991 to 1999 it sent subscribers a series of sampler compact discs under the Music Matters name, eleven releases in total, mixing current acts with older tracks. The project, first overseen by Andrea Norlander of MTV, treated the magazine as a tastemaker brand rather than a print product alone, an early example of a fashion title extending into music marketing. By the late 1990s Details was competing directly with GQ and Esquire for younger male readers, advertisers in fashion and grooming, and celebrity covers.

Comics journalism in the late 1990s

One of the most distinctive chapters in the magazine's history came under cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who served as comics editor in the mid-1990s. From 1997 Spiegelman commissioned working journalists who were also cartoonists to report stories entirely in comics form, and Details published the results through 1998 and 1999. The series helped legitimise comics journalism for general magazine readers at a time when the form was still treated as a novelty in the United States.

The published pieces ranged widely in subject and tone. Peter Kuper reported on Burning Man, Ben Katchor wrote on sport, Peter Bagge covered comedy, Charles Burns illustrated a fashion show, and Joe Sacco reported on the aftermath of the Bosnian war and later returned with another reported piece in 2000. Other contributors included Kaz on an Ozzy Osbourne festival, Kim Deitch, and Jay Lynch with a parody of media censorship. That a men's fashion monthly gave multiple pages to Sacco's war reporting showed how far the Truman-era magazine ranged beyond clothing, and film and comics historians still cite the Details commissions in accounts of the rise of graphic journalism.

Suspension, Fairchild transfer and the 2000 relaunch

In March 2000 Advance Publications announced that Details would be closed in its existing form and relaunched as a fashion magazine. Publication was suspended between the last Condé Nast issue and the first issue under Fairchild Publications, a sibling division, to allow a full redesign and repositioning. The redesigned magazine returned in October 2000 under editor Dan Peres, who was 28 at the time of his appointment and who would remain editor-in-chief for fifteen years, the longest tenure in the title's history.

The relaunched Details was explicitly a men's fashion and lifestyle monthly for a style-conscious reader, gay and straight, rather than a general downtown culture magazine. Peres later summarised the positioning frankly, saying the magazine was not for every man but for a particular reader who liked what it did. Under Peres the magazine won American Society of Magazine Editors honours for design and received nominations for general excellence and photography, and Peres edited the Details Men's Style Manual, published by Gotham Books in 2007. The Fairchild period consolidated the format that readers knew for the rest of the run: fashion editorials and grooming, celebrity profiles, political and social reporting, humour, and service material presented with a knowing, urban tone.

Content, contributors and circulation in the Peres years

Through the 2000s and early 2010s Details published a mix of fashion, lifestyle and politics coverage, with frequent contributors and staff writers who went on to prominent careers elsewhere in American journalism and food writing. Names associated with the magazine included Pete Wells, Jeff Gordinier, Karl Taro Greenfeld and Alex Bhattacharji, among many others. Covers favoured film, music and sports celebrities photographed in a clean, direct style, and inside features combined profiles with essays on masculinity, work, sex, health and popular culture.

Circulation in December 2012 was reported by the Alliance for Audited Media as 456,666. That figure placed Details well below GQ but firmly in the national glossy tier. The magazine employed about sixty people at the time of its closure, according to contemporary reports, of whom roughly a fifth were expected to find other roles inside Condé Nast. Advertising softness was a persistent pressure in the final years, as men's fashion advertising consolidated around fewer titles and digital platforms, and editors repeatedly had to answer rumours that the magazine would fold.

The 2004 controversy

The magazine's sharpest public controversy came in 2004 with a short feature that purported to help readers distinguish gay men from Asian men. The item, illustrated with a photograph of an East Asian model, used language that protesters, including LGBT Asian American individuals and organisations, condemned as racist and homophobic and as erasing gay Asian men altogether. Demonstrations followed, and the episode was covered as a case study in how a joke format built on stereotypes could damage a magazine's standing with the very urban, diverse readership it courted. The incident remained part of the magazine's record in later retrospectives and in discussions of representation in men's magazines.

Closure in 2015 and the move to GQ Style

On 18 November 2015 Condé Nast announced that Details would cease publication with the December 2015 / January 2016 issue. President Bob Sauerberg's restructuring also merged sales and marketing operations for other titles and expanded GQ Style to a quarterly print schedule with a larger online presence. Details.com continued for a transitional period and was then directed toward GQStyle.com. Editor-in-chief Dan Peres and publisher and chief revenue officer Drew Schutte left Condé Nast at the closure.

The decision was widely reported as an advertising and strategy decision rather than a sudden collapse in readership. Print men's titles were under pressure across the industry, and Condé Nast chose to concentrate its men's fashion investment in GQ and GQ Style. Peres later wrote a memoir, published in 2020, about his years at the magazine and his personal struggles during that period, which renewed attention to the relaunch era and to the pressures of glossy magazine publishing in the 2000s. Flanders, the founder, died in 2022 at the age of 82, prompting obituaries that credited her original downtown magazine as the seed of everything that followed.

Legacy and place in American magazine history

Details left two legacies that are sometimes discussed separately. The first was the Flanders magazine of the 1980s, which documented a specific New York world of clubs, galleries, designers and performers and showed that scene reporting, strong art direction and black-and-white portrait photography could sustain a magazine with almost no money. Alumni and photographers from that period, above all Bill Cunningham, carried its visual language into the wider fashion press.

The second legacy was the national men's magazine of the 1990s and 2000s, which helped define a younger, more fashion-forward alternative to the traditional men's titles, normalised frank coverage of grooming, sex and identity for male readers, and, through the Spiegelman commissions, gave comics journalism some of its earliest mainstream American exposure. Its closure in 2015, alongside the folding or print reduction of many peer titles, marked the end of the era in which a mid-sized glossy men's monthly could thrive in New York on fashion advertising alone.

Publication facts

Details was founded in 1982 in New York City, New York, and was based there throughout its life. It was published monthly in its Condé Nast and Fairchild years, carried the ISSN 0740-4921, and was published successively as an independent title, then by Condé Nast from 1989, then by Fairchild Publications after the 2000 relaunch within the same corporate family, before returning to the Condé Nast orbit in later corporate reorganisations. Its best-known editors were founder Annie Flanders, James Truman in the 1990s, and Dan Peres from 2000 to 2015. No print edition has appeared since the December 2015 / January 2016 issue.