In-flight magazines often come across as the publishing equivalent of non-places. Devoid of a specific identity and lacking a recognisable voice, these publications tend to be the editorial equivalent of suburban shopping malls in small-town USA. Paper real-estate we visually stroll through as we fasten our seatbelts waiting for take-off. Like shopping centres, some are more upclass than others, offering brand names in the shape of bylines by well-known writers and logos expressed through glossy page layout, but at the end of the day the format does not change, while the offer remains that of a hypermarket: hopefully something for everyone.

So it was interesting to read that Virgin Atlantic has introduced both a new magazine to its Upper Class, and a new concept:

"Carlos, by contrast, rewrites the flight manual. The modest quarterly (measuring 170 x 240 mm) looks like one of those slim Muji notebooks with a brown card cover. For bourgeois bohemians, as Brooks has noted, roughness signifies authenticity and virtue. In an image world that delivers photographs of hallucinatory brightness and intensity at every turn, luxury is conveyed by the absence of photos. (Rem Koolhaas made a similar point when he said that in a shopping culture, ‘Luxury is not shopping’.) The only photographs in Carlos come in an eight-page Paul Smith insert by Aboud Sodano, which looks more like an art project than advertising, as the designers probably planned."

So not only a new format, but also a specific target group: the Bobo. But following the dot.com bust, the fracas of feel-good capitalism, are there still Bobos flying first class? Aren't many on the railway road to becoming good ol' Hobos?

Whatever the case, there's always a market segment ready to play the alpha male role: has the golden hour of the metrosexual arrived?