There’s nothing too surprising about what turns out to make for a successful nation-brand—a good education system, efficient infrastructure, business-friendly taxes, suave ambassadors, well-designed flags. But what’s striking about the book’s nostalgia, and about the Monocle empire as a whole, is how often it attaches itself to the same historical period. Whether it’s cultivating a pseudo-Mad Men business aesthetic, adopting a posture of masculinity that’s not yet in crisis or yearning for a time when nation-states were ascendant, Monocle again and again returns to the middle of the twentieth century in order to think optimistically about the present. The Monocle world is maybe the culmination of what John Kenneth Galbraith had in mind when he argued in The Affluent Society (1958) that economic development would lead to the continued expansion of a “New Class” of workers whose jobs “will involve not toil but enjoyment.” And when the magazine claims triumphantly that “craft and traditional skills are helping reinvigorate economies and shake up old business models by putting the means of production back into the hands of small-scale makers,” it echoes mid-century critics of mass society like C. Wright Mills, who in White Collar (1951) contrasted the depressing emergence of a society of salesmen with the ethic of autonomous work, in which “family, community and politics are measured by the standards of inner satisfaction, coherence and experiments in craft labor.”
Perhaps it is appropriate, then, that Monocle’s most illuminating predecessor is not GQ or the Economist but the ultimate mid-century men’s magazine. It would be no surprise to find in Monocle something like Hugh Hefner’s first editorial for Playboy, published in December 1953:
Most of today’s “magazines for men” spend all their time out-of-doors— thrashing through thorny thickets or splashing about in fast flowing streams. We’ll be out there too, occasionally, but we don’t mind telling you in advance—we plan on spending most of our time inside. We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex …
The Monocle Man is also suspicious of the “out-of-doors.” “In times of economic turmoil, political instability and rising unemployment, it’s been harder than ever to close that door to the rest of the world,” reads the Guide to Better Living. Yet the space afforded to current affairs at the front of a typical issue of Monocle—a couple of pages of world-news gobbets, elections dealt with in paragraphs, civil wars in captions—shows that it is not so hard after all. Like Hef’s Playboy, the Monocle Man balks at the complexity of the modern world: so much is happening everywhere, and who can understand it all? A cursory glance is all he needs to know that the world is a place he should try to escape. And it comes as no surprise when the Guide to Cosy Homes suggests that he should hide away in an Eames-inspired, mid-century modern sanctuary.
About ten years ago, Tyler Brûlé decided to start his own magazine. He was waiting for a flight and kept seeing people at airport newsstands struggling to choose between the Economist and GQ. Why not combine the two? The result was Monocle, “a magazine briefing on global affairs, business, culture, design and much more.” From GQ it has borrowed and refined the aesthetic of domesticated masculinity; from the Economist a sense of utter certainty about world affairs. Brûlé has described the magazine’s readership as “predominantly male (70 percent)” and working “in finance, public policy, assorted academic fields, media and assorted travel sectors.” It’s a demographic that has proved remarkably receptive to his brand. The magazine has a circulation of roughly eighty thousand despite going for $12 per issue on newsstands and £100 (about $130) for an annual subscription. All this at a time when print is supposedly dying.
All lifestyle magazines project an ideal of what the world of its readers should be like. Monocle is part of a long tradition of men’s publications that perpetuate, as Andrew O’Hagan once put it, the “old fantasy of men having everything they want to have and finding a way to call it their destiny.” But Brûlé’s version of this fantasy is also period-specific. “By the time the markets collapsed in 2008,” he has written, “we found our inboxes full of correspondence from readers who were using Monocle as a guidebook for setting up their own enterprises—or at least daydreaming about them.” In the years since the financial crisis, it has been increasingly common to hear of a crisis of masculine identity. In the United States, over seven million jobs were lost by men during the recession, and some of the most affected industries, such as construction and high finance, were overwhelmingly male.1 1. The most thorough account of the crisis of masculinity in a post-crash context has been Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men (2012). But even those who didn’t lose their jobs—who remained, like most Monocle readers, relatively financially secure—have needed to come to terms with the increasingly low esteem in which traditionally male industries are held.
That the core institutions of Monocle’s readership have been threatened and undermined during the same decade of the magazine’s ascendancy is, for Brûlé, no coincidence. Monocle prides itself on providing a rare “optimistic tone” through “the darkest hours of a sagging economy.” Nowhere is this tone better expressed than in four landmark publications, released sporadically over the last few years: The Monocle Guide to Better Living, The Monocle Guide to Good Business, The Monocle Guide to Cosy Homes and, most recently, How to Make a Nation: A Monocle Guide. These books offer a break from “hectoring voices” and a stylish tour of the world the typical Monocle reader would like to live in, not to mention a note of reassurance for the kind of man who is concerned about the security and virtue of his white-collar job, but even more concerned about where he can find a decent pair of brogues. But they also offer a guide to what has proved a surprisingly persistent social vision, one that brings into sharp relief some of the more glaring contradictions of the post-recession economy.
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To be a Monocle Man is above all to be an entrepreneur. The magazine’s radio station hosts a weekly program, “The Entrepreneurs,” dedicated to “the most inspiring people, companies and ideas in global business.” The show focuses on those who got it right, who found a gap in the market and made a success of their startup. Most often it takes the form of a discussion with an “innovator” behind some product familiar to the gentrified world: the president of the clothing and bag company Filson or the co-founder of BrewDog craft beers (and author of a book called Business for Punks).22. Monocle is comfortable with the effects of gentrification: the higher rents and “hollowing out” of neighborhoods as a result of “regeneration projects” in San Francisco are described as “inevitable,” London’s Olympic Park and attendant developments are “a calming asset to the city’s once overly industrial east,” and while “Central LA might not be the smartest address … in among the gritty bars and shelters for the homeless there’s also a plethora of fun restaurants, artists’ studios and a dense network of businesses making clothing and furniture.” These conversations take on a superficially didactic tone (“Geoff Mulgan from NESTA explains why most meetings are unproductive and gives his top tips for making them better”) in keeping with the magazine’s broader mission to present its readers with a blueprint for the development of their own brands. It’s also through such profiles, as opposed to more conventional coverage of current affairs, that Monocle emphasizes its global scope. Here’s how a recent edition of “The Entrepreneurs” introduced itself:
Scouring the world for good-news stories of those who traded in boring occupations for a more rewarding, self-reliant lifestyle, Monocle tells its readers how they can be rich and authentic at the same time. The magazine boasts “an extensive network of more than thirty correspondents from Milan to Bogotá, Paris to Bangkok,” and there are also “bureaux in Tokyo, New York, Hong Kong, Zürich, Toronto, Istanbul and Singapore.” Brûlé sees his various media platforms as providing a service for people who are neglected by more old-fashioned outlets. “It’s stunning to me what, even among mature adults, counts as news today,” he told New York in 2010. “But I think it just provides more of an opportunity for us to engage with people who want to know if now is the time to buy a large tract of land in Madagascar in order to grow vegetables for the Koreans.”
The celebration and promotion of entrepreneurship has been one of the central features of post-2008 political economy. Several universities in the last decade have established “Centers for Entrepreneurship”; in 2014 Mattel introduced the Barbie Entrepreneur Doll, “ready to make a bold business move and strike out on her own to achieve her career dreams!” Most conspicuously, Silicon Valley startup culture is organized around the notion that innovation and creativity can be systematized—that anyone can become an entrepreneur. In the Monocle world, nothing is safe from being coopted into the cause: Sartre, for instance, “can be considered the philosopher of entrepreneurialism,” while “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is recommended reading for “any entrepreneur contemplating originality and manufacturing in the modern era.” Yet the reach for such lofty authorities is also a symptom of Monocle’s desire to distance itself from what it considers to be the vulgar rhetoric of the contemporary cult of disruption. Brûlé regards the “corporate playgrounds” of Silicon Valley as juvenile and sniffs at “areas of the tech world that like to think of themselves as ‘creative.’” “This is not a book about staging a revolution,” he writes at the beginning of the Guide to Good Business, as if to make sure no one could confuse him with the latest dorm-room billionaire.
The admonition is characteristic of the fine line the magazine walks between celebrating novelty and deferring to tradition. Monocle is happy to indulge the libertarian idealism of the entrepreneur who sees himself as the agent of “creative destruction.” In the Guide to Good Business, Bob Swarup, an “investor and author,” reassures readers that the Great Depression was “the most successful period for entrepreneurs in U.S. history.” The “shortcomings” of the Lebanese state, we are told elsewhere, have created opportunities for entrepreneurs to promote basic services, while Egyptian design firms “are turning crisis into opportunity” and sparking a “post-Mubarak” national economic recovery. Because of its sustained attempts to reduce public-sector bureaucracy and to recruit foreign, freelance tech workers, the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius (where The Corrections’s Chip Lambert became comically enmeshed in the post-Soviet “free-market” startup economy) is lauded as “a beacon for how to do business in the Baltics.”
Yet the Monocle Man is wary of slavishly worshipping the new, leafing through his “Timekeeping and Penmanship” supplement even as he pays lip service to gospel of innovation. In 2015, Kinfolk, in many ways a younger sibling of Monocle, introduced its own “Entrepreneurs Issue” by stating: “After all, we’re all budding entrepreneurs in one way or another, whether we own a small business, have grand plans for starting one or just enjoy daydreaming about throwing caution to the wind to make donuts full-time.” The temptation to collapse the distinction between taking a risk and daydreaming about taking a risk is apparently strong for the kind of reader who is entertained by stories of people who have thrown away a steady solicitor’s salary to make gelato in Tuscany, even if they’re too prudent to ever follow suit. One begins to suspect that what the Monocle Man really wants is to feel like a master of the new economy, but also to uphold the “respectable” ways of doing business: expensive suits and the etiquette of boardroom meetings, as well as the reliable benefits of contractual employment. Perhaps his ultimate fantasy is to live in a world where he could still be taken seriously without having to expose himself to any new ideas, or risk the uncertainty of putting forward one of his own.
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As with all things Monocle, How to Make a Nation manages to be bombastic in its optimism and yet also strangely nostalgic. “We talk about brands so much in our society today,” Brûlé said in an interview, “and I thought that there was really room to look at the nation as a brand as well.” After thirty years of Washington Consensus technocracy, privatization and deregulation, it has become something of a truism to talk of the demise of the nation-state. And you might expect Monocle to sympathize with the cosmopolitan elites who have benefited from this trend. Yet here it is dressing up in kilts and lederhosen, trying to repackage the invented traditions of nationalism for a twenty-first-century market.
There’s nothing too surprising about what turns out to make for a successful nation-brand—a good education system, efficient infrastructure, business-friendly taxes, suave ambassadors, well-designed flags. But what’s striking about the book’s nostalgia, and about the Monocle empire as a whole, is how often it attaches itself to the same historical period. Whether it’s cultivating a pseudo-Mad Men business aesthetic, adopting a posture of masculinity that’s not yet in crisis or yearning for a time when nation-states were ascendant, Monocle again and again returns to the middle of the twentieth century in order to think optimistically about the present. The Monocle world is maybe the culmination of what John Kenneth Galbraith had in mind when he argued in The Affluent Society (1958) that economic development would lead to the continued expansion of a “New Class” of workers whose jobs “will involve not toil but enjoyment.” And when the magazine claims triumphantly that “craft and traditional skills are helping reinvigorate economies and shake up old business models by putting the means of production back into the hands of small-scale makers,” it echoes mid-century critics of mass society like C. Wright Mills, who in White Collar (1951) contrasted the depressing emergence of a society of salesmen with the ethic of autonomous work, in which “family, community and politics are measured by the standards of inner satisfaction, coherence and experiments in craft labor.”
Perhaps it is appropriate, then, that Monocle’s most illuminating predecessor is not GQ or the Economist but the ultimate mid-century men’s magazine. It would be no surprise to find in Monocle something like Hugh Hefner’s first editorial for Playboy, published in December 1953:
The Monocle Man is also suspicious of the “out-of-doors.” “In times of economic turmoil, political instability and rising unemployment, it’s been harder than ever to close that door to the rest of the world,” reads the Guide to Better Living. Yet the space afforded to current affairs at the front of a typical issue of Monocle—a couple of pages of world-news gobbets, elections dealt with in paragraphs, civil wars in captions—shows that it is not so hard after all. Like Hef’s Playboy, the Monocle Man balks at the complexity of the modern world: so much is happening everywhere, and who can understand it all? A cursory glance is all he needs to know that the world is a place he should try to escape. And it comes as no surprise when the Guide to Cosy Homes suggests that he should hide away in an Eames-inspired, mid-century modern sanctuary.
Why is a magazine like Monocle so desperate to go back to the Fifties? With its enthusiasm for globalization, consumerism and entrepreneurs, you would expect it to be comfortable in the neoliberal times we live in now. But as much as the Monocle Man likes a free market, he also wants an ordered society, one where he doesn’t have to work for rent-seeking companies or buy his stationery from anyone he doesn’t personally know. Had he been living in the Fifties, he might have been inspired by the ideas of “ordoliberalism,” a German reform movement that asked the state to protect the development of craft industries, small businesses and corrections to the effects of the division of labor. A significant factor in postwar European economics, ordoliberalism attempted, as Michel Foucault explained in The Birth of Biopolitics, to reconstruct society around “‘warm’ moral and cultural values” capable of compensating “for what is cold, impassive, calculating, rational, and mechanical in the strictly economic game of competition.” Ultimately, though, the ordoliberal compromise between capitalism and community proved no match for the forces unleashed by globalization and the growth of multinational corporations, and the state’s embrace of the intellectual currents flowing from Hayek’s Austria and Friedman’s Chicago. We tend to associate nostalgia for the postwar period with a desire to recover the spurned promises of social democracy. But reading Monocle you get the sense that even the cultures we think of as neoliberal—the makers, hackers, Kinfolk readers and authentic classes of gentrified cities—are wistful for a future that hasn’t yet disappointed.
It’s easy to forget that “authenticity,” now a buzzword of entrepreneur culture, once demanded an aggressive opposition to received opinion. Writing in the aftermath of the Sixties, Lionel Trilling even despaired at how attractive his contemporaries found this iconoclastic disposition, how often they conflated “authentic” madness with liberation. For all its talk of “quiet revolutions,” Monocle bears witness to the fact that authenticity no longer poses any such challenge. It’s a magazine that shows how easily the rhetoric of entrepreneurialism and innovation can accommodate and even enable the endurance of archaic institutions; how so much of what now passes as aspirational and optimistic is motivated by a desire to retreat back in time and back behind closed doors. And as silly and unrealistic as Monocle is on the whole, the ideals that shape it have also come to define the affluent neighborhoods of global cities, where the vanguard of the urban elite pay a premium to keep the old world alive via locally sourced butcher shops and vintage boutiques. Many of the magazine’s readers no longer have to escape the city to fulfill their artisanal dreams or to find their cozy refuge: their neighborhood has already become a village—the only things lacking are the walls.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.