Child fashion magazine

As she steps into a very hot seat, Elle's Roberta Myers is determined make a magazine that's relevant and intelligent

It was Holly Millea's hard lesson in the often unforgiving world of fashion magazines.

She was writing a beauty column for Mirabella. Rather than blithely promoting the wondrous qualities of the new products and procedures, Millea took the rather novel approach of trying to determine whether they actually delivered on the hype. If a cream promised to reduce wrinkles and didn't, she wrote about that. If another claimed to make cellulite disappear but left your thighs still looking like cottage cheese, she called its hand.

What Millea didn't take into account was that many of those companies also advertised on the pages of Mirabella. It was a time when the magazine was struggling for every dollar it could scrounge up, and Millea was told that her beauty column was making the advertising side of the magazine very nervous. One day, she says, she received a call from her editor: They were killing her column. Not because it wasn't popular or useful, Millea was told, but because management feared she was going to cost the magazine advertising dollars.

A few months later, in 1997, Millea got a call from Roberta Myers, the new Mirabella editor in chief. "Holly," Myers told her, "I need you to write that column again." Millea tried to explain the internal politics, but Myers didn't want to hear it. She told Millea to let her worry about it. And with that, Millea's beauty column resumed in the pages of Mirabella.

"In an industry where there's a lot of catering to a lot of people, that was really beautiful," says Millea, now a contributing writer at Talk magazine. "That's the kind of person Robbie is. She's really beloved, and you can't say that about many people in this business. If she asked me to stand on my head for her for eight hours on a Saturday, I'd seriously think about doing it."

That kind of backbone and her willingness to break the conventions of the fashion magazine industry are two of the main reasons Myers was named to be the new editor in chief of Elle in May. "She understands how to create good magazine content," says Jack Kliger, president and CEO of Elle 's parent company, Ilachette Filipacchi Magazines. "She has a great sense of style and a great sense of grace. Robbie understands the American woman very well."

Most of all, Myers has the gift to inspire people to believe in her.

Bob Wallace, the editorial director at Talk, mentored Myers when she landed her first magazine job 18 years ago, at Rolling Stone. "If I was starting a magazine today, Robbie would certainly be my pick as editor," says Wallace.

Even Grace Mirabella, the grande dame of fashion magazines, praises Myers' skills as an editor. "When she was at Mirabella, I thought she was just nifty," Mirabella says. "She's contemporary, solid and has a terrific attitude. I like her inquisitiveness."

Millea's loyalty to Myers is extraordinary in a profession in which writers and editors often seem to warily circle one another, each waiting for the other to do something that ruins their afternoon. Also extraordinary is Kliger's confidence in Myers, considering the fact that Mirabella went belly up on her watch, folding in April after an 11-year run.

Mirabella was known as the smart woman's fashion magazine, and Myers brings that sensibility to Elle, the second-largest-selling fashion book in the country. She calls herself a magazine editor rather than a fashion editor. She talks about creating "a very strong Elle point of view" in the magazine's pages. She plans to increase the number of service pieces. She wants to develop identifiable voices and columns; she's already added former Village Voice editor in chief Karen Durbin to write film reviews. She wants to emphasize insightful and well-written feature stories.

The Myers era at Elle begins at a time when the fashion magazine industry is changing dramatically. There's more competition and greater pressure. S.I. Newhouse Jr.'s Advance Publications now owns two of the top four titles, Vogue and W, in addition to Women's Wear Daily, Glamour, Mademoiselle and Allure. And the entire industry is being pushed by fashion/lifestyle magazines such as Time Inc.'s In Style and O, the joint venture between Hearst Magazines and Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Entertainment Group.

It has long been a debate within the industry: Do readers want journalistic ambitions with their pretty pictures and beauty tips and fashion news?

Hachette is betting one of its flagship magazines that Robbie Myers knows the answer.

It is 4 o'clock on a crisp Manhattan afternoon, and Myers is right on time as she walks up Columbus Circle to a trendy new cafe she has suggested. She's never been here before, and once she eyes the esoteric menu and hears the loud, piped-in salsa music, she begins apologizing for the choice.

"Do you want to go somewhere else?" she asks. Then she calls over the waiter to see if he will turn down the music.

"We're doing an interview," she explains.

He nods and promptly hustles to the receiver and cuts the volume.

Sipping on a soft drink, Myers is dressed in a stylish black outfit. Her smile is warm and friendly, even as she offers that she is shy about giving interviews. She is currently running the magazine from home while on maternity leave; her first child, Francesca, was born just two weeks earlier. "I'm sorry, but I've got to do this," she says, pulling her wallet out of her purse and showing off a snapshot of the baby. "I know all new mothers say this, but isn't she so cute?"

Myers, 40, the daughter of "a couple of hippies," grew up in the Midwest. Her love affair with magazines began when she was attending Colorado State University. Like a lot of people who came of age in that generation, she was inspired by the new journalism pioneered at Rolling Stone and Esquire. "I got completely turned on by reading this great writing about what was going on now, what was happening with the lives that we were living," she says. "I especially loved Rolling Stone; it was the first magazine for us."

When she graduated in 1982, Myers moved to New York, determined to get into the magazine business. She had friends at Conde Nast who arranged for her to interview for an entry-level job; she failed the typing test. Another friend knew Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner and told her they were looking for an editorial assistant. Myers pestered the magazine about the job, going as far as showing up at Wenner's office unannounced. She won an interview, and the Friday night before her appointment, she went to a bookstore, bought a $2.50 book on typing, and taught herself to type over the weekend. Myers passed the typing test that Monday, and she got the job.

She immediately caught the eye of Bob Wallace, who was the magazine's managing editor. "She just stood out," he says. "I knew even back then that she had the potential of becoming really good. She got how magazines work, what's a good story and what isn't. She already had the ability to see the bigger picture. She's the real deal; you don't spend time with Robbie without falling in love with her."

When Myers left Rolling Stone, she began a steady ascension in New York's magazine world. There were stays at interview, Seventeen, In Style. In 1993 she became the editor of Tell, a magazine published by Hachette for NBC. Myers caught the eye of Hachette vice president and editorial director Jean-Louis Ginibre and, two years later, she was named senior articles editor at Elle. "Her real strength is that she's a phenomenally good journalist," says Elaina Richardson, Elle's former editor in chief. "She's a good editor, one of the best line editors I've ever worked with. She has a good sense of how to build the rhythm of a story."

After two years at Elle, Myers was named editor in chief of Mirabella. It was that experience that would teach her all about the high-pressure world of fashion magazines and guide her to one of the most coveted jobs in the fashion magazine world.

When Myers took over Hachette's Mirabella in 1997, it was drowning in red ink. Launched in 1989 by former Vogue editor Grace Mirabella as an alternative to fashion magazines devoid of intellectual content, Mira bella was conceived by its namesake as a magazine that respected the intelligence of women, a magazine that was the antithesis of books filled with fluff. Mirabella was never a resounding financial success. Hachette purchased it in 1995 and tried to stop the hemorrhaging by turning it into a bimonthly. Hachette also toyed with the formula, attempting to shift the magazine to a younger readership. When that didn't work, the company went back to the original concept. By then it was too late; the spirit was lost, and readers and advertisers alike were confused about exactly what the magazine was supposed to be.