Wyatt Mitchell in New York

Published in print, June 2015.

Words by Dan Rookwood
Photography by David Urbanke

Wyatt Mitchell is not just a New Yorker, he is The New Yorker. As the iconic magazine’s first creative director in its 90-year history, he is the aesthetic custodian of a much revered and respected literary institution. Mitchell is also the best-dressed man at Manhattan’s most fashionable address—One World Trade Center, the new home of Condé Nast magazines— which is where MITT met with him.

“If I drink a coffee, I might die,” says Wyatt Mitchell while perusing the barista’s menu. “Seriously. My heart can’t take caffeine. But I will have a herbal tea.”

We are sitting in the Condé Nast cafeteria on the 35th floor of the tallest building in the western hemisphere, the newly opened glass-and-steel 1,792-foot exclamation point that dominates the skyline where the Twin Towers once stood.

This cafeteria is the hallowed water-cooler where editors and creatives of the world’s most powerful and iconic magazines—from Vogue to Vanity Fair to GQ to, yes, The New Yorker—congregate to chew anything but the fat. A fashion fishbowl, it thrums with Prada-wearing devils power-lunching on their vanity fare of kale and quinoa salads and pressed juices.

The coolest man in the room is Mitchell. On the day we meet, the six-foot-something 48-year-old is wearing a daring double-denim combo of indigo chore jacket and jeans with a white dress shirt and black tie—an unusual high-low ensemble, but it works. The look is accessorised with a silver tie slide and poking out from his chest pocket is a pencil sharpened to a spike. He looks just as sharp.

Mitchell is more usually attired in a suit—often a three-piece—worn with a hat except during the sticky heat of a New York summer. He wears his shirts buttoned up—sometimes with a tie, sometimes with a bow tie, often without a tie at all.

“I work at The New Yorker, which is a respected institution, and I want to do it proud, so I account for that in my style,” he explains. “I like a turn-of-the-century look. I think there was a certain decorum with dressing in suits and hats back then. I like the idea that men who wore suits every day had a respectability about themselves, a respect for work, and a respect for other people.”

“Wyatt is a gentleman from another age, an old soul in a young man’s body,” says his friend and former boss Scott Dadich, the editor-in-chief of technology magazine WIRED. “He has such a singular style, sort of a timeless mash-up of Boardwalk Empire meets Cool Hand Luke: textural mixing with classic pieces and odd flourishes. I couldn’t pull off half of what he wears, but I do aspire to being as comfortable in suits as he is.” 

Up until carrying out a recent inventory when he moved apartments, Mitchell owned more than 70 suits
—a lifelong collection. He’s since edited it back to 41. “This is the embarrassing part about being my age: many of those suits I could no longer wear. I just had an attachment to them in the hope that one day I lose some weight and I can put them back on. Of course, I’ve kept a lot of them because I love those suits. I love them.”

Mitchell describes his wardrobe as organised and orderly but not obsessively so. His new apartment, a short walk from Union Square, is a clutter-free haven of clean modern minimalism. “I live in a crazy city so I like to treat a home as a kind of quiet, peaceful, reflective sanctuary,” he says. “I need the room cleared to breathe. I like space.”

What does the creative director of The New Yorker—a man with direct access to some of the world’s best photographers, illustrators and artists—choose to have on the walls of his apartment? “More than anything I have photographs of jazz musicians. I have a wonderful picture of Bill Evans, the piano player, taken by Jim Marshall, which I was lucky to get before Jim passed away. It is signed by him and it is beautiful—one of my most treasured things. I have a Frank Sinatra photo, I have a Duke Ellington photo, I have a Dizzy Gillespie photo …”

Music is Mitchell’s great passion in life, jazz in particular. For a long time when growing up, he worked in record shops. “I’m one of those people,” he says. He feels that today’s instant, easy access to limitless music via digital services such as Spotify has diminished the experience of personal discovery.

“I spent so much of my life finding music. Part of the enjoyment was not just listening to it, but the searching for it in the first place. I remember looking for a Nick Drake box set—what’s it called? Fruit Tree—on vinyl, which was really hard to find. I finally found it and I just could not have been happier that day. It must have taken 10 years to find that. I have now digitized all my music, but I’ve kept any CDs or records where there was a journey or a difficulty in finding the artefact.”

Mitchell has also taught himself to play various musical instruments over the course of his life. “I played the trumpet unsuccessfully in high school. And then I was fascinated by the bass guitar and taught myself that for a few years. Now I play the piano, and my goal is to slowly teach myself jazz piano so that, at the point of my death, I will be at my best … just as I sort of drift off. I have no ambition to have a gig, but I do want to get better and better and better.”

“He should be in a jazz band,” says Dadich later over email. “He’s too modest, but very, very good.”

Growing up as an only child in small-town Ohio, Mitchell spent a lot of time by himself. There is a theme running through his life of picking things up that interest him, spending time learning to work them out, giving them a go. This is how he got into the world of design in the first place. “Yeah, I did not go to art school at any point,” he explains. “I remember that one day someone came in with a Macintosh computer and said: ‘We need a desk to put this on. We can’t find a place to put it.’ I said: ‘Put it in my office.’ Only because I liked the idea of swivelling around in my chair between my two computers. So they put it in there and I played around with it and started to learn some of the software and thought, ‘Wow, this design stuff is kind of cool!’ And that’s how I began on the path.”

Up until that point, Mitchell had been working as a quantitative analyst—an economist—crunching numbers. It sounds a million miles away from design, but Mitchell can see a parallel between the two disciplines. “To me, they’re very much the same idea,” he says. “A magazine story or, indeed, an entire magazine is a complex mix of data. It needs someone or a group of people to synthesise it and make it presentable and digestible so that the reader can enjoy it without finding it overbearing and oppressive.”

He moved into working on the production side of publishing on magazines such as DETAILS, Vibe and Esquire, picking up tips from the magazines’ designers as he went. With no formal training, he learned on the job until he was skilled enough to transition into design.

It’s an approach that has served Mitchell well. “He’s self-taught in so many ways, and with it comes a natural boundary-busting tendency,” says Dadich. There is a freedom of expression and approach that comes with someone who has natural flair rather than strictly trained ways.

To date, he has amassed an impressive 70 awards, including an unprecedented three consecutive design ASMEs (the award of the prestigious American Society of Magazine Editors) and three consecutive Society of Publication Designers “Magazine of the Year” titles for his innovative work at WIRED.

His current job would seem much more restrictive on the (type)face of it. He is tasked with modernising and evolving a venerable old title while retaining its visual character and DNA. Does he find it creatively inhibiting? “The New Yorker is the perfect job for me right now, after having been at WIRED, which was much more free, much more innovative, much more experimental,” he replies. “This is a job where I’m not designing for awards or for flash or for self-recognition; I’m designing to make this iconic brand better.”

No more free-form experimental solos; now he’s playing the well-known jazz standards. “This job is about the improvement of something that is revered and regarded and isn’t broken. So, it’s a more thoughtful, smarter type of design and, in some respects, more delicate, because mistakes have a larger effect with a brand like The New Yorker. At WIRED, you can make a mistake and then, next month, you try something different and readers expect that or understand that. The New Yorker readers are not as forgiving.”

From Mitchell’s office window, he enjoys a toy-town view of lower Manhattan and the Hudson River. “The window is perfect,” he says. “I draw a lot of inspiration from looking around me, aware and observing. I get most of my creative inspiration from just walking around, being on the subway, overhearing a conversation, listening to music, seeing this movie, just living. Part of my job is about creativity and, therefore, I have to give some room for that to sort of bubble up.”

The musical riff returns. Mitchell likens his job as a brand leader to being a jazz bandleader. “I want people to understand what the mission and philosophy is behind what we’re doing—then improvise.”

When does he do his best work? “I think better in the morning. I have brilliant ideas in the shower. I’m at my clearest. But I might be more creative in the evening time with music playing. I think there can be a distinction between the two.” 

Just don’t give him any coffee. 

END