Fashion magazine woman

AS readers shop around at the newsstand, the Big Four are striving to stay in step with the times

Once tailor made for the doyennes of chic, high-fashion magazines served up haute couture that only an elite few could actually afford. But those days are long gone.

With the casualization of America and with all facets of culture--from Hollywood to high tech--influencing style, a new breed of magazines has started to grab women's attention in recent years. Increasingly, the reader has been driving the shopping cart, not Seventh Avenue and not the magazines themselves. Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Wand Elle, the four major high-fashion books, have found themselves on the verge of becoming fashion victims. So, like Ralph Lauren and Giorgio Armani, fashion editors have evolved, trying to attain greater reach by moving away from haute couture to a blend of aspirational and accessible offerings.

"The big challenge is finding a new way to engage a modern woman who is not the fashionista of old," says Ten Agins, author of The End of Fashion. "These new consumers, especially these young women, they're not fascinated with the couture in Paris, they don't know what it means, and they really don't care."

What most women want, she adds, is to quickly learn what's new and where to find it, and to glean some tips from one easily digestible package.

"Fashion magazines are always struggling with how to keep current, given the subject matter they cover and given the world they're in," says Patrick McCarthy, chairman and editorial director of Fairchild Publications, publisher of W. "It's a constant refrain--'We've got to change, we've got to change, we've got to change."

Two magazines--Marie Claire and In Style--have helped to lead this transformation, teaching the Big Four a thing or two about what women really want. That has meant going beyond haute couture to High Street and adding a dose of service, more features and a heavy infusion of celebrities, including covers. Basically, a one-stop shopping guide for a girl's every whim.

Achieving this mix has meant reworking the classic model of a fashion magazine, one that was shaped by the dominant sensibility of longtime editors. "If you look back at [Harper's Bazaar editor] Carmel Snow, [Vogue editor] Diana Vreeland and [Mademoiselle editor] Edie [Raymond] Lock, a lot of these women and men were not as involved in servicing the times," says Ross Klein, senior vp/corporate marketing at Polo Jeans Co. "They felt that the magazine's voice could be that singular voice of whoever the editor in chief was."

Marie Claire, a joint venture between Hearst Magazines and Marie Claire Album S.A., helped pave the way for mixing and matching high fashion with streetwear, all with an eye toward service. "Women who were interested in fashion previously have gone to those magazines that just specialize in fashion, and all they got is head-to-foot designer wear," notes Glenda Bailey, Marie Claire's editor in chief, whose November cover touts "100 Best Buys Under $100." "And if they were looking for bargains, then they went to other magazines. Whereas we have tried to provide the very best at every single price point."

Bailey has also added features about women around the world, and made celebrities and models earn their covers. In March, Brooke Shields trekked to the Arctic, where she built and slept for three days in an igloo; and the cast of the upcoming movie Charlie's Angels lived on a deserted island la Survivor for its December cover.

Since its U.S. launch in 1994 as a 250,000-circulation quarterly, Marie Claire has seen its paid circulation jump to 887,451, up 3.9 percent through June of this year over the same period in '99, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Newsstand grew 8.1 percent to 548,740, beating out all of the high-fashion books.

Advertisers, too, have fallen for Marie Claire. "That magazine is enormously fresh," raves David Verklin, CEO of Carat N.A., a media-services company. "Although that magazine is clearly aimed at the middle market, it's one of the most innovative, well written and really well focused magazines in the marketplace."

Even fashion bible Vogue, under editor in chief Anna Wintour, has branched out, featuring more realistic fashion such as that in the monthly's Runway to Reality section. The section shows readers how to mirror the look of clothes worn by models in Milan without breaking the bank.

Though Vogue may be the fashion darling among advertisers--with ad pages up 4.1 percent to 2,965, according to Mediaweek--circulation has barely budged beyond 1 million in the past five years. Paid circ grew by 1.1 percent through June over the prior year to 1.1 million, and single copies fell 9.1 percent, according to ABC.

"We're where we want to be in terms of circulation--we're an upscale magazine," says Wintour, who has been Vogue's editor since 1988. "We don't want to be a huge, mass-market magazine, otherwise we simply wouldn't be Vogue."

And that's just fine with advertisers. "Donna's new-collection suit was on the cover of September Vogue, and I would challenge anyone to find that suit anywhere on the planet Earth right now," says They Laird executive vp/corporate creative director for Donna Karan International. "It's just gone. The power of Vogue as it relates to fashion is indisputable."

Still seeking a new voice, Harper's Bazaar continues to revamp in order to increase circulation. Though advertisers are signing on to Bazaar--with pages up 15.7 percent over 1999 to 1,637 through November, according to Media-week--the makeover has yet to draw readers. This year, paid circulation fell 5.7 percent to 708,104 through June, and single copies dipped 2.5 percent.

The appointment last year of Vogue veteran Kate Betts as the successor to the late editor Liz Tilberis was seen as a move by Hearst Magazines president Cathie Black to get HR better in sync with the times. With a mandate to make the magazine more accessible and younger (HB has the oldest readers, with a median age of 40), Betts has completely remade the monthly.

In trying to distinguish Bazaar and at the same time help younger women relate to the content, Betts has sought to bring a narrative form to fashion through themes like June's "Family" issue and April's "Fashion Gets Wired" issue, which focused on tech chic. "High-fashion magazines are searching for ways to reinvent fashion in a more cultural or social context," explains Betts. "It means more to the reader because it's not enough just to have a very accessible commercial photo anymore. You have to tell more of a story, you have to supply more of a context or a personality."

Betts last month replaced creative director Paul Eustace with editorial/design consultant Raul Martinez, most recently Vogue's art director, to help articulate her vision. "I needed to work with somebody who understood those narrative ideas of fashion," explains Betts.

For the past 15 years, Elle has sought to be the high-fashion book that readers could easily identify with, says ex-Mirabella, editor Roberta Myers, Elle's editor in chief since June. "We have fantasy fashion, we know that's what our readers like, but we also want to bring them things they can actually [wear]," she says.

Still, Elle--the second-largest high-fashion title--has remained stagnant the last five years, with paid circulation flat at 918,795 and ad pages through November up only 1.9 percent over the prior year, to 2,057. By December, Myers will have infused Elle with more fashion and beauty service, along with a food column. Feeding into the Hollywood frenzy, Elle features Gwyneth Paltrow on its November cover and Sharon Stone for December.

The appetite for Hollywood celebrities has, in recent years, meant that models have been supplanted as cover images--a key part of editors' efforts to lure readers to the newsstand. At the same time, fashion and showbiz have become ever more closely linked. The magazine that's capitalized the most on this trend is Time Inc.'s In Style, a voyeuristic journey into fashion through the lens of Hollywood. "In Style knew that most people wanted to stare at somebody they knew," explains author Agins. "You were seeing these people in context. It's not some esoteric, fashionista, New York-centric publication but something that really is accessible to people."

In Style launched in June 1994 as a monthly with a 500,000 rate base, and it quickly exploded. It now boasts a paid circ of 1.57 million, up 15.5 percent from the previous year. Through November, its ad pages were up 34.4 percent over last year, to 2,468.

"The celebrity angle was a way to help make fashion real and fun and exciting to people," says Martha Nelson, In Style's founding managing editor. The way that traditional fashion magazines covered style remained unchanged for decades, she says, but in the years since they launched, fashion has become much more accessible.