Subscribe to the BrittonBritton newsletter! | Tell a friend about this page.

Joel strikes a relaxed pose

Joel strikes a relaxed pose

Joel enters the roaring 40s – hats off for a heavy hitter!

Claes Britton | Aug 28, 2006 | 9 comments

So even my main man and junior Stockholm homeboy Joel Berg has crossed that 40-yard line, headed for touchdown in life's vast playing field. The occasion was celebrated in the hot midst of August with a magnificent two-day extravaganza down at his 18th century mansion in the Småland province in southern Sweden, appropriately named Berga, honored by Joels closest oldtime friends, family and a selected few international guests.


Age gets to us all, that must be something of the oldest truth in that book, but if I ever imagined that there would be one single exception from that rule, I would have figured it to be Joel, this certified prodigy wiz kid. With a designer mother and architect father, Joel drank fashion, design and esthetics in his mother's milk. He didn't need any education whatsoever to become an art director, leaving Stockholm for the first time at the towering age of seventeen, to work in the art departments at a couple of major New York advertising agencies. Back in Stockholm, he was recruited by my dear wife Christina to found men's fashion magazine Café in the late eighties, now in his young twenties. I still remember vividly the grief and frustration which I felt when the slick bastard suddenly got up and left us just when we were getting the mag rolling, once again for New York, to art direct fashion magazines Allure, Mirabella and, eventually, in the mid nineties, Harper's Bazaar, under his mentor Fabien Baron, who of course attended the Berga party, driven up from his famed new spectacular Swedish summer house in the southernmore Skåne region.


Joel stayed out in New York for seven years, then returned to Stockholm before he relocated with his family to Italy, where he for nine years has art directed the great Milanese daily La Republica's weekly fashion supplement D Donna, a magazine that frequently surpasses Vogue Italia's September issues in page volume. He directed the magazine for several years from Stockholm and made the move to Treviso in the Veneto province only when he, some four years ago, was appointed creative director of Benetton, driving back and forth to Milan weekly at 200 kilometers per hour, the mobile phone constantly at his ear. Benetton and D Donna are far from Joels only tasks, however. This fall, among many other projects, he will be the founding creative director behind La Republica's new monthly fashion magazine Velvet, destined to become a formidable competitor to the above mentioned Vogue Italia. Joel says that he wants the magazine to be something of a cross between V and W magazines, and, take my word for it, if there's anyone who has the capacity to pull off a less than humble stunt like that, it will be Joel, who also art directed the two most recent issues of our own magazine, Stockholm New. Anybody with an interest in fashion and magazines will be well adviced to keep their eyes open for this new magazine, to be launched this November.


Joel is not entirely comfortable with turning forty, to phrase it moderately. I know he feels that mounting age like a slowly tightening choker, something I mentioned in my own speach at the birthday dinner, where I also touched upon the subject of the movie character of which Joel reminds me, Ray Liotta's in ”Goodfellas” – in the late scenes, when Liotta is closing some drug deals and trying to offload of a bag full of defunct handguns, while at the same time cooking an elaborate Italian birthday stew for his kid sister, all the time with the FBI chopper hovering omniously above. I concluded my speach with a comforting wisdom on the progress of age, drawn from my own recent experience: there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. So just keep rocking in pursuit of that 50-yard line, my brother man!


And I still haven't told you about Joel's nigthly 365 Magnum shooting practises in the editorial corridors of Harper's Bazaar – or about that misty autumn morning when the two of us hit a big ol' elk cow in Joel's 1963 midnight blue Bentley sedan... we thanked our lucky stars for all that massive steel in the fifteen-foot front of that big lard-ass carriage that time – unfortunately the poor cow couldn't say the same...

Comments

Lägg till kommentar

Recent blog entries