In 2003, three years after launching 10 Magazine with a car loan the bank refused to give her, Sophia Neophitou-Apostolou turned her attention to menswear. The result was 10 Men — a biannual companion title that brought the same editorial philosophy to a space still caught, at the time, between lad-mag posturing and corporate stiffness. The premise was identical to the mothership: photography first, celebrity worship never, creative freedom above all. That it arrived from the same five-storey Georgian townhouse in Soho, edited by the same woman in her Alaïa heels, only made the point sharper. If Neophitou-Apostolou could rewrite the rules of women’s fashion publishing, she could do the same for men’s.
The magazine runs to over three hundred pages per issue — sometimes past four hundred — printed at 230 by 300 millimeters, oversized and tactile. Alex Wiederin serves as consulting creative director, and together with Neophitou-Apostolou he has built a visual identity that treats menswear not as an afterthought to womenswear but as its own complex visual and cultural territory. Each issue carries a thematic frame: recent editions have explored “New Daily Uniform” and “Transformation,” the latter marking the 25th anniversary of the 10 franchise with a candid conversation with Giorgio Armani and reflections by queer fashion creatives Kai-Isaiah Jamal and Kyle De’Volle on their personal and professional evolutions.
What distinguishes 10 Men from its competitors is the same thing that distinguishes its sister title: an absolute refusal to let celebrity sell the cover. David Beckham and David Gandy have appeared, yes, but it is the photography and styling that define the publication, not the fame of the person wearing the clothes. The photographers who shoot for 10 Men — Nick Knight, Juergen Teller, Mario Sorrenti — are given the kind of creative latitude that most men’s magazines reserve for their annual special issue and then quietly withdraw. Here, that latitude is the baseline.
Now over sixty issues deep, 10 Men exists as proof that menswear publishing can be as visually ambitious and editorially uncompromising as anything on the women’s side. It is part of an expanding empire — Zac Publishing, named after Neophitou-Apostolou’s son — that now includes editions in Australia, the US, Japan, and Germany, plus 10+, launched in 2018. The whole enterprise runs on a conviction that has not changed since 2000: fashion publishing should be about the power of the image, not the power of the publicist.
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