Designer Jop van Bennekom and journalist Gert Yonkers are both Dutch and evidently well-respected in their respective fields and both are completely foreign to me, although I am beginning to understand their artistic sensibilities as I continue to study—not read, mind—their beautifully rendered magazine Fantastic Man.

Spring & Summer 2009, the most recent issue, Bret Easton Ellis is drinking a Diet Coke on the fashion-throwback matte cover of this rather large (approximately 9×12) and substantially full magazine, ringing in at nearly 200 pages.

The cover strikes me as an expression at once avant-garde and cheeky; even the title itself—Fantastic Man—indicates a pomp and grandeur that is not altogether serious (note:  Fantastic Man is also the name of an animated Filipino superhero with powers to turn his appendages into various objects, including power drills, forks and guns).

Thwarted, however, is any notion that the magazine is not focused in its intent, for when one begins rifling through its pages, it becomes clear that only the top designers in men’s fashion have been allowed entrée, although the ads, like the rest of the magazine, are devoid of the usual slick gloss finish and are instead coolly toned down by the same matte finish utilized on the cover, much of which is in black and white.  Additionally, the ads are sparse relative to other (men’s) style magazines and function as elements of the conceptual endeavor that threads fashion throughout the magazine in an often subtle but never gauche manner.

In fact, the axis that makes the planet of Fantastic Man an improbably cohesive entity is that it maintains fashion-forward principles while sustaining a rhythm of its own that is antithetical to the methods by which its brothers and sisters attempt to render those same principals—principals whose primary objective is to excite the consumer to embrace the publication’s philosophy enough to subsequently spend money on their advertisers.

The featured men of Fantastic Man, most of whom would not be given the time of day in other men’s magazines, each play a role in the conceptual whole of the magazine, yet this is because on a macro-level, the men contribute to the fashion industry as a whole:  Pierre Cardin, Konstantin Grcic, Ben Gorham—obscure sounding names, perhaps, except Mr. Cardin, their seeming obscurity the sort of profound irony on which Fantastic Man’s energy thrives.

For instance, one particular section of the magazine, “Reviews, Recommendations, and Some Nonsense,” is rooted firmly in both subversiveness and irony, satirizing the GQ-style recommendations that read more like absolutist declarations:  No, I repeat, no—never wear socks with Gucci loafers.  Never.  Ever.  Period. Instead, Fantastic Man highly recommends toast—yes, I do mean the banality of sliced bread.  Toast, according to the magazine, is “A delicious treat that can be prepared in 3 minutes.”  Another nod is given to Coca-Cola, a beverage phenom of which most folks in the modern world are unaware.  On the other hand, some “Utterly Unrecommended” items, in the context of gifts, include:  STDs, peacock feathers, anything alive…

Filed under “Some Nonsense” is  “Who Ate What?  Dinner Choices of Various Gentlemen Around the World on the Evening of Thursday, February 5th, 2009,” a parody of the voyeuristic and speculative reportage on where celebs were spotted eating and shopping, now a staple of every grocery store check-out gossip mag.  As an example, Bryan Adams—not Ryan Adams, mind, as much as he would enjoy the attention—ate at home in London, UK, with some friends and crew members.  They had home-made veggie burgers on pesto focaccia bread buns with pommes frites.  Grapefruit sorbet as a dessert.  No drinks. So now you know, and how complete you must feel!

I will acknowledge that I have a penchant for the bizarre, the surreal and the esoteric, and that is why I ended up ordering a year’s subscription of Fantastic Man—in other words, two magazines shipped from Amsterdam over the course of one year.  The mainstream bookstores, by and large, do not carry the magazine, and even the hippest hipster boutiques that make a concerted effort to appear unhip as a way of seeming even hipper, do not typically carry the magazine either, so if you have unusual taste, celebrate first, then visit the magazine publisher directly at www.fantasticman.com