In 1986, Nick Logan had a problem. Six years earlier, the former NME editor had invested £3,500 of personal savings into launching The Face, which had become the defining style magazine of its generation — a publication that fused music, fashion, and visual culture with a boldness that mainstream media could not match. But The Face's readers were growing up. They still cared about how they looked and what they read, but they had moved beyond the youth culture the magazine documented. There was nowhere for them to go. As a later editor, Peter Howarth, would put it: Logan did not spot a gap in the market. He simply wanted to make the sort of magazine he wanted to read.
The result was ARENA, and there was genuinely nothing like it. Before its launch in the autumn of 1986, the category of the British men's magazine effectively did not exist. There was the American edition of Esquire, but it had a distinctly American voice. There was no equivalent framework, no context, no template for what a British men's publication should sound like. Logan, who served as editor, brought in Dylan Jones — then at i-D — as assistant editor, and enlisted Neville Brody, who had designed The Face, to create the visual identity. The first issue included a profile of Walter Matthau for no other reason than that Logan liked him. That kind of instinct — personal, idiosyncratic, unapologetic — defined the magazine from the start.
Industry sceptics predicted failure. They were wrong. After six months, ARENA was selling more than 50,000 copies. By the end of its first year, circulation had reached 65,000 — proving, as Dylan Jones later wrote, that the Bermuda Triangle of British publishing was nothing more than a myth. The success was so conspicuous that Condé Nast launched the British edition of GQ in direct response. Jones himself would go on to become ARENA's editor in 1990, then move to GQ UK, where he remained for decades. Other editors followed — Kathryn Flett, Peter Howarth, Ekow Eshun — each bringing their own sensibility while maintaining the magazine's core identity as a place where fashion, culture, and ideas could coexist without embarrassment.
Logan sold his publishing company Wagadon to Emap in 1999, and the magazine changed hands again before finally ceasing publication in 2009. But by then, ARENA had already accomplished what it set out to do. It had created a category that did not exist, trained a generation of editors and art directors who went on to reshape men's media worldwide, and proved that a men's magazine could be both stylish and substantive. The last issue was not so much an ending as an acknowledgement that the culture ARENA had helped create no longer needed a single publication to sustain it. The vocabulary was everywhere.