The Cover

Why did I give the name Flair to the astonishing magazine I created and edited in 1950?

I did it because to me the word was an instantaneous symbol of any flight of imagination. For all those young at heart it meant a sense of surprise and the joy of discovery and was thus especially apt for a new magazine not produced in any familiar format.

I endowed this magazine with the image of the beautiful gold bird's wing I had found at the flea market in Paris. I knew at once that it was what I sought as a symbol for the publication I was secretly creating--a magazine that, for the first time under one set of covers, would have the best in all the arts: literature, fashion, decoration, art, travel, and entertainment no longer frozen in a familiar format. Instead? The reward of surprise and discovery.

Pages would be filled with adventures in printing, with new use of space, with the unexpected changes in paper--issues never followed the format of their predecessors.

Most of all, I wanted the magazine to give a vital contemporary direction and fullness to American life. This it did.

Flair remains one of the major creative events of the magazine world in the United States, and it brought pride into the record of my career in publishing. I am still referred to by many as Flair's Fleur.

Fleur Cowles