Details

Details is presented as a magazine gaining wider reach and drawing on both contemporary identity-making and the history of Andy Warhol’s art-world circle. In the diary, its national ambitions, an item about people’s real names, and a newly published page of old photographs show a publication attentive to how names and images shape public recognition.

Growth and Reach

In August 1986, Beauregard, identified with Details, brought Warhol a new issue and told him that the magazine was going national. The report marks a change in its intended reach, though the diary gives no circulation figures or further account of how the expansion unfolded.

Names and Public Identity

The same issue included a feature on people’s real names. Warhol noted examples tied to the magazine’s circle: Annie Flanders, whose original surname he remembered uncertainly as something like Schwartz, and Beauregard, whose real name was Billy Stretch. The detail makes naming itself part of the magazine’s subject: a public identity could be built around a chosen name rather than simply inherited or disclosed.

An Image from 1965

At a party for Dolly Parton, people from Details were present with an issue containing Stephen Saban’s photographs, taken in a photo booth in 1965 when Warhol was at his first art show at the University of Pennsylvania. Saban had been a student then; he obtained signatures from Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, and Gerard Malanga on separate pictures. The new issue gave one of those images a full page, carrying a moment from the early art-show years into a later magazine setting.

Image, Memory, and Recognition

The old photo booth pictures connect Details’ contemporary attention to names with its use of an image from Warhol’s past. The feature on real names drew attention to the labels people used; the full-page photograph made a historical scene newly visible. Together, these appearances suggest a magazine interested in how identity and recognition are circulated—through names, photographs, and the changing reach of print.