By Charles Peterson

VICE (Vis), n. 1. an immoral habit or practice. 2. a personal shortcoming; foible. 3. a magazine founded by Suroosh Alvi in 1994 as a Montreal-based magazine that has expanded into a “global empire of hedonism” with retail stores, pubs, a record label, a film division, and a hell of a website: viceland.com.

VICE may be a sensitive, politically correct person’s worst nightmare, but for many young hipsters, it is the ultimate source of an indefinable sense of “cool.” Over the past decade, VICE has expanded to a veritable empire that includes, to name a few, a magazine read by thousands from America to Japan to Australia and beyond, clothing stores in New York, L.A., Toronto, and London, a recording label, and a book entitled The VICE Guide to Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll. No one could have expected this punk, politically incorrect, in your face, trash-talking magazine to morph into a successful multi-media empire—still run by the same three subversive founders who started it ten years ago.

Suroosh, how did VICE magazine begin?
After four years in Quebec going to university, I traveled around everywhere: six months in Minneapolis, four months in Vancouver, a year in Slovakia. Then, I moved back to Montreal, and started the magazine in ‘94.

How did you manage to land the government subsidy that helped you launch VICE?
There was a Haitian organization that specialized in government grants. They basically said to me, start an English magazine and we’ll get grants to sustain it. What you had to do was get on welfare. It was like a work program. You’d ask for a hundred dollars on top of your welfare check if you were working in publishing. So, that’s how I was getting paid. I was on welfare, plus a hundred bucks a month in the magazine.

Whomever I hired had to do the same thing. First I found Gavin [McInnes], my co-founder and convinced him to go on welfare. And then Shane [Smith] came over—he was living in Hungary. He wanted to be a writer, so he also had to get on welfare. That was the deal. We didn’t pay anyone. We just went around, and wrote everything ourselves. We were eating beans. We were poor.

	VICE Website

How did VICE expand from a small independent magazine to an international venture capital?
We decided to go from Montreal to Toronto and get national advertising. Even though we had no distribution net set up, we told all the labels we were going to be a national magazine and they started advertising with us. All of a sudden, we had a lot of ads!
Then we started getting mass media recognition because the content was so shocking for Canadians that we were getting banned from college campuses. For some, we became champions of free speech, and for the politically correct movements, we became something that needed to be banned on college campuses.

There was a piece in the Montreal Gazette written about us. In it we lied and said we had a lot of people that wanted to buy us—including a guy named Richard Selwinsky, who is a software millionaire in Montreal. Selwinsky happened to read the article and said, “Who are these guys? I’ve never heard of them before, and they’re saying that I want to buy them?” We met him, and he bought twenty-five percent of our company on the spot. That’s how we financed our move to New York and our expansion in the States at the end of ‘99.

With all the advertismments some people have criticized VICE for succumbing to commercialism. Is VICE selling out?
I’ve been doing this for ten years now. At a certain point I stopped eating beans and started eating steak, but that doesn’t matter. We will never compromise our editorial content.

VICE is the only international, free rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle magazine out there. Now I’d say we’re older and wiser because we’ve probably made every mistake possible and still managed to survive. We’re finally in a position where we can breathe a little easier, but it’s taken us ten years. VICE has been an exercise for three guys who had no real idea of what they were doing. With that, it spawned a record label, a film division, a TV division, two books, and a bunch of stores.

What lies in the future for VICE?
We will continue to expand internationally and launch in new territories. We’re looking at Germany, Italy, France, Moscow, and possibly Shanghai. We’ve just reached our ten-year mark and VICE is bigger than I thought it would be. But it’s also no way near what I thought it would be. We’re extremely ambitious, and want to keep going. In Japan, the VICE store could work well. In the UK, the VICE record labels are doing well. We’re trying to open a pub there in a few months.

Photographs by Dominic Sidhu