Scarcely a year after taking the thing over with editor Glenn O’Brien, Fabien has apparently thrown his toys out of the pram, and is taking his ball, aka collaborator and creative director Carl Templer, with him. If true, that’s quite a blow for the revamped mag, in losing its biggest name just a handful of issues into his redesign (though the monochrome template he’s left is pretty robust and will hold up for a couple of issues with a temporary replacement, if that’s what happens).
WWD has broken this story, with few details and even fewer mixed metaphors than me, over here.
UPDATE: WWD now reports that FB is leaving “to focus all [his] energy” on Baron and Baron, his client-work studio. Coming only two weeks after a change in publisher, all is presumably not well at the big I.
The same piece claims that M/M Paris have been tapped up to replace FB at the top – a reversal of what happened at French Vogue in 2003, when FB replaced M/M as creative consultant. Now I’m a big fan of M/M, particularly their work with Bjork and their fashion alphabet, but they do strike me as a rather obvious choice. Expect more monochrome and elaborate typography.
