English Summary
Editor’s Letter
Change your image
I am full of pride. Pride for the GQ team, which I am fortunate enough to be the head of. The best representatives of a generation are working here. You can’t even imagine just how many wonderful and unimaginable ideas are brought to life at the main newsroom desk while we’re preparing for each issue or new article for GQ.ru. It’s true that the path to realizing these wonderful ideas is long, exhausting, and full of unexpected turns. And so let’s roll!
The first person to take a hit is the producer. She’s the one who has to listen to the aids and assistants about how “we’re not willing to do that,” “that’s not our style,” or “we have never done/never do anything like that” (underline whichever applies). All the known diplomatic skills in the world are used in order to convince the star to hear us out, then to try something on, then to try out a new image during a photoshoot. Of course throughout the negotiation and persuasion process, the whole thing loses its luster, gets simplified, loses the details or the nuances that made it special.
So, the shoot is done. Now it’s time to strike an agreement. We don’t show our photos before publication, but the negotiations are tortuous, and at a certain point you give in and agree to let the star look through the pictures. And quelle surprise, our hero is frightened of his new image: his followers will stop loving him, his fans won’t recognize him, people won’t understand. Where does this fear come from? What makes them go numb? So many surprising, truly beautiful images have died in because of this fear of losing one’s audience. Clearly every career has a point of no return. And it’s not about a person becoming a professional in a certain field, gaining the respect of his colleagues and a significant amount in his wallet and then being worried that if he changes what he does, he’ll have to start over almost from scratch. No, here we’re talking about something completely different. We’re talking about a devotion to their style of choice. Actors and musicians, TV anchors and restaurateurs all