Vanity Press

Equator

You don't have to equip yourself at Banana Republic to read Equator. This slick new review of international trends is not published in Quito, Kampala, or Singapore, but thirty-eight degrees north in San Francisco. It was started six months ago by two married couples, refugees from the East Coast and European magazine industries—Heidi Benson and John Miller, and Randall and Cynthia Koral.

Equator runs in all directions at once: hot and cold, East and West, pithy and long, punky and chic, fashion and fiction, pop music and painting. "If you think about it," says Miller, "fiction and style aren't really all that different. People are interested in all kinds of things."

Equator opens with a Life-like four-color cover and proceeds with short reports from such faraway longitudes and latitudes as Tokyo, San Salvador, London, and (even) New York. From its cover story on David Byrne to an interview with "Brit Brat" novelist Martin Amis and fresh photos by Robert Frank,

Equator attempts to cut across the dotty imaginary line that divides "pop" from "proper."

With its sixty-fourpage debut (replete with a Paper-style foldout on San Francisco itself) selling out on both coasts at two dollars a copy, Equator may be the cheapest world tour currently ayailable

Craig Bromberg