Come One Come All See: The Incredible Shrinking Magazine!

As any young fashion lover can attest one of our first memories of the fashion world is begging our mother to buy us an issue of Vogue in the grocery line, finding a copy of Bazaar in our sister's junk pile, or simply sitting in the magazine section of a store letting the glossy pages with other worldly clothing slip through our fingers.  For future fashion mavens all over the world the fashion magazine is often the very first dipping of the toe in the fashion world lake. The pages of Vogue, Elle, Harpers Bazaar, W, and Marie Claire have held the far off hopes and dreams of girls and gay boys everywhere.  So imagine today how painful it is to witness an entire generation forsaking our sacred glossies.  


The true sign of a magazines current success is advertisement sales.  The advertisers show that there is a significant enough audience to start, continue, or stop advertising.  Vogue, W, and Harpers have hemorreged ad sales dating all the way back to 2009 while Elle has been more of a success story in the the current economic climate.  Looking at Vogue and Elle as the two top American fashion magazines what is it that separates the two titans?  Vogue has long been the inequivocal leader in terms of legitimacy and clout in the fashion magazine world, so why has Elle suddenly surged while Vogue has fallen?

Studying the Vogue v. Elle battle it is difficult to determine the formula that has made Elle so successful as of late.  It is painfully evident to fashion junkies that celebrity culture has taken stranglehold of the fashion industry from shows to magazines to parties to advertisements.  Yet this cannot be an explanation in Elle's success because both Vogue and Elle have bought full well into the idea of placing the same actresses on the cover year after year.  Elle on one hand has specifically targed their design, stories, advertisements, and even outfits to a much younger audience.  Vogue still banks on the fact that women of a certain age still have subscriptions.  On one hand Vogue features quirky, interesting, groundbreaking Grace Coddington produced editorials while Elle features editorials of Sarah Jessica Parker in clothes that would have been too young for even Carrie Bradshaw circa 1999.  While both Vogue and Elle have both become lifestyle magazines rather than fashion, Vogue is the stuffy Upper East Side society wife to Elle's reality television starlet.  Neither is ideal to a fashion lover, but Elle on a newsstand now has the flash and sparkle to draw in a teenager while Vogue's cover's simply look in perfect consort growing dusty next to O Magazine and Ladies Home Journal.

So now, in the time of their greatest peril the world of fashion magazines have switched gears to defense.  In the last few years the explosion of fashion blogs have made the flow of fashion information instant.  There are more deft opinions coming from more voices and faster.  Recently 13 year old stylerookie Tavi Gevinson has gained great fame for her blog and with it great consternation and criticsm from magazine editors themselves.  Editors dismiss Gevinson and others as amateur, childish, and gimmicky.  Yet what these magazine editors fail to recognize is the possibility of fashion blogs.  Bloggers advertise for free theirfavorite buys.  Bloggers review their favorite magazine editorials.  Bloggers are a gold mine of advertisements to go out and buy the full fashion articles.  At the heart of it, bloggers are the core base customers of fashion magazines.  


Fashion magazines have become overwrought with boring celebrities telling the same bland story about their first breakup and their favorite designer buy.  Magazine editors think it is good business to write the same stale articles about something entirely unrelated to fashion.  What editors need is a high dose injection of fashion into their magazines.  People look at fashion and particularly fashion magazines as aspirational.  To flip through a glossy and see an amazing outfit is to daydream at your cubicle.  To flip through a glossy and see a story about a divorcee who opened up a horse farm in Colorado is neither aspirational nor fashionable.  Editors must wake up and realize their lifestyle efforts have failed and to take a lesson from bloggers success--fashion magazines must make a return to fashion.