New 'NY Times' Style Mag Arrives Sunday

By: Jay DeFoore (Photo District News) The newest competitor to W and Vanity Fair will not be found on newsstands but enclosed within the Sunday edition of The New York Times.

T: The New York Times Style Magazine will be published eight times a year, with the first being inserted into the Aug. 29 edition of the newspaper. Each issue will be centered on a different theme, such as fashion, design and living.

Devoted to women's fashion, the debut issue of T has 167 advertising pages out of 288 total pages. Actress Kate Winslet is featured on the cover.

Times Advertising Senior Vice President Jyll Holzman said in a statement that the magazine "is designed to appeal to a wide demographic audience across all categories related to luxury, lifestyle, fashion and culture and we believe it will provide an exceptional advertising environment for marketers to reach a solid and loyal readership base."

In a bonus distribution program, 13,000 additional copies of T. will be distributed during Broadway Night (Aug. 29) in the Republican Convention Delegate Welcome Kit, during Olympus Fashion Week (Sept. 8-15), and on the Hampton Jitney.

Beginning next year, the Times' Sophisticated Traveler will join the T magazine collection.

Stefano Tonchi, the magazine's style editor, says photography will play a central role in defining the identity of T. And to drive the point home, Tonchi says each cover of the magazine will forgo text and coverlines in order to reduce clutter and give the cover photo plenty of room to breathe.

In a recent interview, Tonchi outlined what to expect from the magazine, the first of which recently went to press.

T's look will largely be shaped by photographer Raymond Meier, who was commissioned to shoot the magazine's first four covers. Tonchi says Meier was particularly suited for the job because the photographer's "graphic signature" is evident in his images of beauty models and celebrities as well as his food and product photography.

The pages of T will be filled by many of the same A-list photographers and emerging artists that help shape The New York Times Magazine award-winning visual identity. T has already commissioned two of the hotter photographic duos working today -- UK-based photography team Coppi Barbieri and Jenny Gage and Tom Betterton, both of whom are repped by Art + Commerce. Todd Eberle has shot for the design issue, and the magazine is collaborating with artists Vik Muniz and Sam Taylor Wood.

Tonchi says the "multi-layered" photography of Jean-Baptiste Mondino, whose pictures "always stay in our mind for one reason or another," will be featured in the first issue along with a portfolio of images by Dutch design team Viktor & Rolf, who only recently took up photography.

Pointing to the latter, Tonchi says personal vision and style are the qualities he looks for most in a photographer. "Because of the incredible technical resources that are out there in the photography world, the idea is stronger than ever," Tonchi says. "Everybody can be a great photographer technically or find a great assistant. So it's very much about the originality of the idea and the execution of the idea."

Tonchi, who was the fashion creative director for Esquire before joining the staff of the Times Magazine last fall, envisions T. as a general interest magazine, albeit one that is focused on all things style-related.

"Fashion is not [just] about clothes anymore," Tonchi says. "It's about accessories, it's about lifestyles, it's about restaurants, it's about buildings and shops done by famous architects and things like that."

Tonchi says many of the photographers he'll feature in the magazine are now shooting digitally, something he would have been reluctant to do in the past. "It's interesting how many nuances you can get today from a digital picture," Tonchi says. "I always used to look at digital photography and think that it was so bi-dimensional. Finally, there is really a three-dimensional quality to it that I have not seen so much and I was quite surprised by it."

On the other end of the spectrum, T. will also embrace "good old reportage techniques" of people like Magnum's Bruce Gilden and portrait photographer Ben Watts. "We don't want to lose anything on the technique and rawness of street photography by Bruce Gilden, but at the same time we want to be out there and look at new technologies."

T. is staffed by many of the same creatives who work on the Times Magazine. Janet Froelich is the creative director, Kathy Ryan is the photo director and Scott Hall is the magazine's photo editor.

T: Men's Fashion, which will feature looks, trends and personalities, will make its debut Sept. 17; T: Design, which will look at where home design converges with architecture, decor and home furnishings, will make its debut Oct. 10; and T: Living, which will feature lifestyle and entertaining trends and report on the latest in food, wine, tabletop, kitchens and baths, will appear Nov. 7.