HAUTE POP

Magazines need to stop treating people like they are stupid. We can look at these covers and recognize that these are all women who have something to promote. You are so deeply in the pockets of PR people that you let them choose who you put in your most important cover of the year. These women have no fashion story to tell, hell even lifestyle stories are nonexistent after you’ve given identical interviews for the last 5 movies you promoted by being on the cover of a magazine. This is NOT how you save a dying industry.

(KDS310 on NYMag - The Cut - September Fashion Magazines Earn Praise for Skewing Older This Year)

Magazine circulations are actually doing ok, I understand, but this comment is nonetheless bang on. None of these women means anything in fashion terms - very few celebs do (e.g. Tilda Swinton, Chloe Sevigny, Gaga cos she wears catwalk McQueen in videos). Halle Berry on US Vogue is a lousy fashion choice too, even if it is sadly still important to see a black woman on the cover. And yet these magazines have chosen these slebs for the covers of their September issues, i.e. the biggest most important fashion issue of the whole year.

I understand US fashion mags don’t have quite the same brand images as their UK equivalents do - e.g. UK Bazaar is higher fashion that its US equivalent, but US Glamour is a bit classier than the UK version. Still, US Bazaar and Elle are both supposed to mean something in fashion terms, yet with these covers they diminish themselves to populist celebrity-enthralled pap. There is sure enough a market for that, and perhaps that’s all that matters. But what a massive, massive brand dilution.

It’d be really interesting to see how far this has affected the advertising they carry. In the UK, Vogue, Bazaar and Elle carry adverts for the designer mainline collections, e.g. four pages of Chanel showing the unwearable furry things they put on the catwalk. Cosmopolitan and Glamour, by contrast, only get ads for Chanel perfume, sunglasses and cosmetics, as it’s presumed their readership is unable to afford the clothes and perhaps a bit less interested in high fashion too.

Let’s see if I’m a big enough nerd to buy the US mags and do a page-count…