david sims

>> "I feel the men's magazines lack energy. Everything feels so affected and fey and not real somehow," Ashley Heath, Arena Homme+ editorial director, proclaims. "These new covers are just an attempt to do something a bit different and eye-catching on the newsstand."

The magazine's two Fall 2011 covers — the issue hits newsstands tomorrow — are a hint at the 30-page portfolio inside, which David Sims shot, employing his friends, assistants, and models who caught his eye. "[The covers] come from this quite raw, punky, digital space," Heath explains. "I feel there's more reality in David playing about with shapes and colors and cheap computer effects — deconstructing fashion photography if you like — than there is in the status quo . . . You look at a painter like [Gerhard] Richter and how brutal he is; he'll switch from a beautiful canvas to thinking, 'How can I do the total opposite of that?' I think there's an element of that with David Sims's new work. He's handing in stunning fashion images to Grace Coddington [at Vogue], then working on playful, experimental stuff for Arena Homme+."

>> Just as it has been announced that the Costume Institute's "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty" set an attendance record over the weekend, the house's Fall 2011 ad campaign — featuring Raquel Zimmermann in her own kind of savage beauty, captured by David Sims — has dropped.

As of Sunday night, more than 582,000 people have seen the "Savage Beauty" show, surpassing the previous record — for a fashion exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — of 576,000, set by “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy” in 2008. The McQueen exhibit closes in a week on Aug. 7, and is expected by that time to rank among the Met's 20 most popular exhibitions, since the museum began tracking attendance 50 years ago.

>> With its new editorial team, the biannual Arena Homme Plus has become something of a brother publication to POP — they now share the same editorial director, Ashley Heath, and the magazine's new editor in chief, Max Pearmain, used to be acting menswear editor at POP.

Heath and Pearmain's first edition of Arena Homme Plus hits newsstands next Monday, April 11 in the UK (and Monday, April 18 for the rest of the world), boasting four different covers, one each playfully dubbed "Stephen," "Stevie," "Steve," or "Steven."

"The men's fashion magazine market has become so staid and predictable," Pearmain notes of his vision for the magazine. "It was actually more inspiring in many ways 15 years ago when there was just L'Uomo, Vogue Hommes, and Arena Homme Plus . . . We wanted to inject some surprise and some passion and some playfulness back into this world."

Pearmain himself styled New Order's Stephen Morris for the "Stephen" cover, artist Clunie Reid created scrawling artwork for the "Stevie" cover (left), David Sims photographed the "Steve" cover, and Steven Klein, of course, captured the "Steven" cover. The Klein version of the issue — or Homme+ PLUS as it has been christened — comes with 45 extra pages of more "hardcore" content. Some of it has already been posted online (NSFW) and will only be sold in selected independent retailers and online.

The move back to Arena Homme Plus is something of a coming home for Heath, who used to edit the magazine himself: "It's been fun to return. I really built that magazine on blood, sweat, and tears back in the day, so it was great that David Sims, Steven Klein, and others from the glory days returned and contributed such strong, strange work. There's this sense of travel, of art and design, of the way the world is changing . . . We changed the paper stocks a bit and did that 'special sections' thing I'm into recently. The magazine is still niche, but it will appeal to a broader cross-section of stylish men."

Alongside contributions from Sims and Klein, the new issue also features work by Wolfgang Tillmans, Collier Schorr, and Ari Marcopoulos.

>> Although Emmanuelle Alt says her full vision for Vogue Paris won't be felt until the August 2011 issue, the April 2011 issue marks her first as editor-in-chief of the magazine. Already, she's made some changes — expanded beauty coverage, simpler layouts and typography, a bigger commitment to feature articles among them. And she has plenty more in mind: “I want to show in French Vogue more and more a lot of clothes." In fact, of this first issue, she says: "It’s simple fashion. You can see the clothes perfectly.”

She plans to continue devoting covers largely to models, but will require them to show less skin than they did under Carine Roitfeld's eye. “One boob,” she says of this first issue: “Otherwise, you don’t recognize it’s French Vogue.” And instead of Roitfeld's edgier vision, Alt says: “I want the Vogue to become very feminine. Women are very interested in fashion and beauty.” She's also recruiting a new team of freelance stylists: “I want to have new people working for the magazine. I also want to push some young stylists: all the girls who have been trained by French Vogue.” A look at the outcome — Alt's first issue — in the slideshow.

>> Crystal Renn is following up her Chanel and Jean Paul Gaultier campaigns last season with another campaign one-two punch for Spring 2011: Jimmy Choo and the newly-released DSquared2 set, in which she is joined by Anna Maria Jagodzinska, Sun Fei Fei, Hailey Clauson, and Monika Sawicka. Put that together with the new Missoni Spring 2011 ads, which feature the Missoni family along with Leighton Meester and social personalities like Tatiano Santo Domingo and Camilla Al Fayed, Freja Beha Erichsen's Valentino ads, a first look at Mariacarla Boscono for Loewe, and Sarah Burton's first Alexander McQueen campaign featuring Lindsey Wixson, and you've got the sum whole of the latest Spring 2011 ad campaigns.

>> The deluge continues; after yesterday's introduction to the Spring 2011 Chanel, Tom Ford, and Marc by Marc Jacobs campaigns, today brings another onslaught — Karlie Kloss's third straight campaign as face of Christian Dior; a first look at Kasia Struss for Miu Miu (Sasha Pivovarova and Querelle Jansen are also said to have been cast by the label); and perhaps our favorite campaign of the season so far, Alex Prager's take on Karolina Kurkova for Bottega Veneta, left.