The stars are in town. The Rolling Stones are staying over there, my driver says, pointing out of the window as we speed down Unter den Linden in central Berlin. And Penelope Cruz there. Each hotel is fronted by a gaggle of paparazzi sunning themselves on the pavement. It's the Berlinale, the annual film festival, and I'm here to meet the founders of a countercultural magazine with designs on the television and movie industry.
Back in 1994, three friends in Montreal - Shane Smith, Suroosh Alvi and Gavin McInnes - bought out Voice of Montreal, a magazine funded by the Canadian government as part of a welfare programme to provide work and promote community service. After a fallout with the original publisher, they wrested control, dropped the 'o' ('for legal reasons', Smith explains over a kebab) and Vice was born.
'We wanted to be the first international voice for the universality of youth sub-culture,' says Smith. At 38, he now looks more like a media mogul than a countercultural hipster. In just over a decade Vice has gone from little more than a fanzine to a magazine with 900,000 readers in 22 countries and an international brand which takes in clothing, TV, book publishing, music (Bloc Party has released an album in the US through Vice Records) and now film.
'Vice' is practically a definition of the magazine's content. All off-kilter life is here. Skaters feature alongside interviews with the likes of Abu Hamza. And its take-no-prisoners approach has captured the imagination of what marketing people call 'trendsetting metropolitans' aged 21 to 34. The Cassandra Report, the influential consumer guide, named the magazine the number-one tastemaker in this crucial demographic for the past five years.
The magazine's roster of photographers includes Terry Richardson, Ryan McGinley, Richard Kern, Dash Snow and Observer contributors Jamie-James Medina, Alex Sturrock and Danielle Levitt. Richardson is famed for his point-and-shoot style and has shot campaigns for Gucci, Levi's and American Apparel. McGinley, a former photo editor for the magazine who still contributes cover shots, was the youngest person ever to have a solo show at the Whitney in New York.
'I first saw Vice in my local video store,' McGinley tells me from his Manhattan studio. 'I hadn't seen anything like it before.' As one of a group of young, up-and-coming photographers and writers, McGinley recorded the fast life of the magazine and its friends in New York's Lower East Side. 'Things back then were crazy,' McGinley concedes, 'but these images were just a part of my life. When you group all the images together though, as they were in Vice, it creates a myth.'
These images are now included in a lavish coffee-table album, The Vice Photo Book, which reveals the magazine's strikingly broad range of photography, from serious photojournalism to party snapshots to nudes. 'Vice runs everything,' says McGinley. 'It happily runs full-frontal nudity, which is pretty ballsy.'
Jamie-James Medina, 25, who started working for the magazine when he was 19 and made his name photographing London's burgeoning grime scene, agrees. Now focusing more on photojournalism, Medina has travelled to Tokyo, Bangkok, Jamaica, Sudan, China and North Korea with Vice. 'I love the fact Terry Richardson can shoot girls, Ryan McGinley can shoot this beautiful art photography and I can sneak in there with a bit of photojournalism,' he says.
The magazine's range has broadened enormously in recent years. As Medina puts it: 'Hipsters grow up. It's just not cool to be dumb any more.' Later, at dinner in a Twenties-style Berlin bierhaus, Smith appears, sporting a Kim Jong-Il lapel badge he was given by a general he befriended in North Korea while making an undercover documentary. I ask him about the criticism Vice has faced over the years.
'There was a time in the Nineties when it was all about cocaine and asymmetrical zippers,' Smith admits. 'We did a lot of drugs and went to a lot of parties and had sex with a lot of supermodels. But you realise there's a whole world out there, and as we've expanded, the scope of the magazine has got broader.'
To that end, Smith has set up VBS.tv, an online television station which boasts Spike Jonze as its creative director. 'They're inventing new things every day,' says Tom Freston, a creator of MTV and former head of Viacom. 'It reminds me of MTV in the early days.'
'We became a magazine when the barriers to making a magazine effectively became nonexistent,' explains Smith. 'You could do desktop publishing on a Mac and print for cheap. Now you get a digicam and a Mac, and you can have something broadcast on the net within 15 minutes.'
It was VBS that premiered Heavy Metal in Baghdad, a documentary about four young metal fans in the war-torn city trying to rehearse and play gigs to a tiny group of like-minded fans before escaping to Syria. The film won critical acclaim at the Toronto International Film Festival. Its producer, Monica Hampton, and editor, Bernardo Loyola, worked with Michael Moore on Fahrenheit 9/11. So where do the magazine's political allegiances lie? 'We're not trying to say anything politically in a paradigmatic left/right way,' argues Smith. 'We don't do that because we don't believe in either side. Are my politics Democrat or Republican? I think both are horrific. And it doesn't matter anyway. Money runs America; money runs everywhere.'
The Vice brand - for all its dislike of celebrity - now has a growing band of celebrity followers. As well as Jonze, Hollywood stars Luke Wilson, Johnny Knoxville and the film director Michel Gondry are all friends of Vice. More unlikely still is the Bono connection. 'I have to admit we've also started working with Bono. I should hate him,' Smith laughs, 'but he's a good guy.' The 'good guy' has called VBS 'punk rock for the 21st century', so one wouldn't really expect Smith to describe him any other way.
After dinner, we move on to a party in an old warehouse in East Berlin. The walls are covered in peeling paint, and Berlin's hipsters are queuing to get in. Peaches, the New York DJ, is playing, and Smith and Alvi are circling the room. Among the party talk I hear snatches of conversation about international distribution deals and future projects. Earlier that evening, under the disco ball, Smith said of the early years: 'We definitely tried to put our flag in the sand against the status quo media.' Now the line attached to online TV station VBS reads: 'In 10 years, we'll be the mainstream.'
· To order a copy of The Vice Photo Book for £25.95 with free UK p&p, go to www.guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875
