Angelina Jolie pours salted caramel over her head for Stylist

Nigella Lawson resists the caramel option for the cover of Newsweek

It’s a good job guest editor Nigella Lawson decided to pour salted caramel over her head for Stylist‘s cover photograph by Matthew Shave, while Angelina Jolie resisted the temptation in Sofia Sanchez and Mauro Mongiello’s shot. Otherwise, I’d be confusing my Stylist with my Newsweek! The US news magazine carries an eight-page feature on the film actress – and Louis Vuitton has her in a full-page ad on page 2.

Just yesterday I read a news story about a new video game installed above urinals to stop patrons getting bored: you control it by sloshing your urine stream left and right. Read that back to yourself and ask if you live in a sane society.

Couldn’t agree more.Though the rest of G2 seems to have lost its way – 4 pages on Amazon’s warehouse! How many times have I seen that piece before? PR, pure and simple.

Someone even tweeeted: ‘Charlie Brooker’s Dark Mirror has a twist that made them physically sick’.

Dark Mirror, Channel 4, Sunday 9pm.

He meant Kate Moss, of course, his former partner and mother of their daughter. Moss is the face on the exhibition’s publicity and the cover of the Rizzoli book. The tour changed then. It was no longer just about a great magazine with images and ideas from  many of the greatest illustrators, styists and photographers of the past two decades (though the names drop thick and fast, Bjork, Taylor-Wood, Coldplay, Hirst, the Chapmans, throughout the exhibition). Instead, it was about family. And philosophy and technology.

Both Reeves and Hack talked of the magazine’s staff and contributors as family. And there are two rooms celebrating a lost member of that family: Alexander McQueen. The fashion designer and couturier hanged himself in February 2010 a week after his mother died.

I asked Hack what was the best-selling issue. He responded not with numbers, but the fact that the Fashion-Able cover (September 1998) is the most requested back issue. This led us into room 5 of the exhibition where Nick Knight’s fashion portraits of men and women without legs, or arms, are projected on three large screens – the shoot was the idea of McQueen with styling by Katy England. It is a great cover – a model, who on first glance could be Kate Moss, with prosthetic legs. Arresting.

‘That was the point were the magazine grew up,’ said Hack, taking us into the room. ‘With that issue we were on page two or three of the world’s newspapers. We realised that you didn’t have to be the best-selling magazine to have an influence on culture. That has been our philosophy ever since.’

Getting editors to talk about philosophy can be difficult; for many it is too ethereal, even sounding pretentious. But the best magazines have one. The Economist has a page on its philosophy: ‘We are international, we stress the links between politics and business, we are irreverent and we are independent,’ says John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief. Mike Soutar had a ‘mantra’ in 1997 at FHM – ‘funny, sexy, useful’. US satirical monthly Spy was ‘smart, funny, fearless’.

Many magazines have a family feel. Take Sir Luke Fildes, who was illustrating The Mystery of Edwin Drood when Dickens died half way through the monthly serial being written:

‘… at the request of the family, who wished me to fulfil the desire of the great writer, they asked me after the funeral to come and stay with them, and it was then, while in the house of mourning, I conceived the idea of ‘The Empty Chair,’ and at once got my colours from London, and, with their permission, made the water-colour drawing a very faithful record of his library; and stayed with them until they left the house prior to the sale.’

Woman’s weeklies have long talked about a family of staff and contributors, so Woman’s Own in the 1950s would discuss the lives of its writers and artists – showing a photograph of cover artist Aubrey Rix with his new baby for example, and discussing the roles and lives of young members of staff. And the promotion of the royal family in this era was a boon to magazine sales.

As for technology, Hack described a software installation by Nick Knight as ‘an app ten years ago’. Run your finger across the image to reveal layers of other images underneath. The software was developed for manipulating images – as in Knight’s cover for the Yohji Yamamoto exhibition for the V&A catalogue. And Reeves identified a watershed – eight years ago – for the switch to digital imaging at Dazed. Going back beyond then was ‘a nightmare’, she said. After that, the illustrators and photographers had digital archives of their work. Before then, ‘I’d end up at their mum’s house with a box in the garage.’

The free exhibition 20 Years of Dazed & Confused Magazine opens at Somerset House in London tomorrow. You can buy the Rizzoli book - a hefty 300-plus pages for £35 with more pictures than you can shake a stick at – at the exhibition or from the Dazed website.

Eat and drink nearby: American Bar at the Savoy; Gordon’s Wine Bar by Embankment Tube; and The India Club on the Strand.

Ralph Steadman cover for Johnny Depp interview talking about Hunter S. Thompson in Shortlist's 200th issue

Free city men’s weekly Shortlist is celebrating its 200th issue with a Johnny Depp article promoting a film adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary. On the cover is an exclusive (to all 523,665 copies) Ralph Steadman cover. Steadman was the Gonzo artist who illustrated several of Thompson’s articles and books, such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

iPad on its stand

Used this iPad on its stand at the office last week and was impressed by its stability. So I picked it up to examine it. An iPad stand has got to cost £30, I thought. But this is what I discovered:

iPad stand is a hole punch and Blu-Tack

It’s a hole punch with the iPad held on with Blu-Tack! What office hasn’t got a hole punch (cost £8) and Blu-Tack lying around doing nothing?

First of all, it’s £10 for any three magazines – great for Monocle or Tank buyers who already pay £5 a throw. If you take both, then just pick up a free copy of Tatler.

Next, you see the flashes on Company and Glamour – £2 each.

And if that’s not tempting enough, IPC has bagged the November compact issues of Marie Claire (usually £3.60) and In Style (£3.70) together for £4.99.

So, for £10, you can walk out with £17.30-worth of magazines: Monocle, Tank and the IPC combo.

This is WH Smith really using its buying power to increase its share of the market – but it will be local newsagents that suffer, and they are probably already smarting from the loss of News of the World sales.

Quiz of the day: by what name was WH Smith originally known? Search (Ctrl-F) on WH Smith on this magazine history page to find out.

Dazed & Confused magazine is to celebrate 2o years on the news stands with an exhibition at Somerset House in London and a book (shown above with Kate Moss on the cover).

‘Making It Up As We Go Along’ will run from 4 November 2011 to 29 January 2012 and is being curated by Jefferson Hack (who founded the title with photographer Rankin) and Emma Reeves in collaboration with Somerset House.

The exhibition features Dazed & Confused magazine’s ‘most infamous visual stories, legendary photoshoots, iconic covers, controversial editorial content and artwork from influential photographers, designers, and artists’.

Work includes commissions by Rankin, Nick Knight, David Sims and Terry Richardson, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Damien Hirst and Sam Taylor-Wood, Katie Grand, Katy England, Alister Mackie and Nicola Formichetti, Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood and Gareth Pugh.

This exhibition coincides with a book on 20 years of Dazed & Confused published by Rizzoli.

The sessions will cover:

• how investigative journalism is done;
• the role of social media;
• funding;
• the role of investigative journalism in society;
• opportunities and threats;
• the importance of conducting investigations in the public interest.

The Communications Committee sessions start at 3.30 on Tuesday 11 October in Committee Room 2 of the House of Lords and will be webcast live at www.parliamentlive.tv. The sessions are open to the public.