The Business of Fashion Magazines: They Do Far More Than Photograph Dresses and Suits

Inside a fashion magazine you meet celebrities, models, designers, photographers and brands without end, all scheming against one another and all depending on one another. Fashion is a business, and so are fashion magazines.

You think that sweater just happened to end up on you?

Without warning, a silver-haired Meryl Streep lays bare the whole life story of the sweater Anne Hathaway is wearing: how a designer chose that odd shade of blue, how it worked its way through the fashion cycle on store shelves and into the outlets, and how, long after it had gone out of style, a poor assistant bought it and put it on... Everyone has seen The Devil Wears Prada.

Today LVMH, the world's largest luxury group, and L'Oréal, the largest cosmetics group, each sell tens of billions of euros' worth of goods a year. And the fashion industry as a whole? Hundreds of billions? Trillions? It is still growing.

One indispensable link in this enormous business is the fashion magazine you usually just flip through.

I

The first modern fashion magazine was Harper's Bazaar, founded in the United States in 1867. Paris was already the world's fashion capital; the launch of Harper's Bazaar signaled that New York was racing to catch up. Cosmopolitan followed in 1886, and after it, one by one, came VOGUE, Seventeen, W, Allure, Nylon and Lucky.

Nineteenth-century America was living through war and social reform. Fashion magazines drew women's attention elsewhere: they talked not only about postwar reconstruction or the Fourteenth Amendment, but also about beauty and clothes.

Young, intensely commercial America was fertile ground for fashion magazines, though Europe had home-grown titles of its own. In the end it was media giants such as Condé Nast and Hearst that spread across the globe, and new titles, spin-offs and licensed editions sprang up everywhere.

In a carefully designed tawny building in New York, Hearst's famous magazines share one headquarters. Besides the editors' offices, the building has photo studios and wardrobe rooms, and on the upper floors a food laboratory for the home magazines, which is to say a kitchen. It is a temple of fashion and lifestyle.

Fashion magazines today are highly specialized. Men's fashion split from women's long ago. Some titles cover only watches, jewelry, home or lifestyle; some put health ahead of fashion; and some help you dress up while massaging your psyche and serving you a bowl of chicken soup for the soul.

Many Hearst and Condé Nast titles have come out in Chinese editions in one form or another. In the 1990s Trends (Shishang), a magazine born in China, was launched; it has since grown into a Chinese fashion media group not to be underestimated. And in bookstores serving China's international communities you can always find the American, European and Brazilian editions of the same title. Some obsessive collectors try to gather one magazine's editions from a dozen or so countries, and the differences between editions are a favorite subject in the trade.

A fashion magazine is like a snobbish woman who is also hard-working, professional, magical and powerful.

II

The silver-haired character Meryl Streep plays in The Devil Wears Prada was modeled on Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of US VOGUE since 1998. Her bob is one of her trademarks.

In 2010 Milan Fashion Week clashed with the Oscars. Anna Wintour let it be known that she would fly home for the Oscars and give Milan only three days. Dolce & Gabbana, Prada, Fendi and Armani all asked the organizers to reschedule their shows so that she could see their collections. That unlucky Milan Fashion Week was squeezed into a Milan "fashion weekend."

"VOGUE is the fashion bible," a PR executive at a French luxury brand told QDaily. Some magazines exist to build brand "awareness"; others play the key role in shaping "brand image."

Anna has a powerful network of contacts that runs from politics and business to celebrity. Countless photographers, models and designers owe her a leg up. She does not play by the rules. For her first VOGUE cover she put the Israeli model Michaela Bercu in Guess jeans and a Christian Lacroix haute couture top, and caused an uproar.

In 2008 Forbes named the 10 most influential fashion magazine editors-in-chief in the United States. Cindi Leive of Glamour, Robbie Myers of Elle, Amy Astley of Teen Vogue, Joanna Coles of Marie Claire and others made the list for defining a magazine's style, redesigning their titles and lifting sales.

The September Issue, a documentary about the making of VOGUE, has a scene in which Anna Wintour sits down with the head of America's most important department store group and its buyers to discuss the magazine's direction and content for the next six months. Besides formal meetings like this, many small trend discussions happen in the gaps of fashion week. Stylists, buyers and magazine editors sit in cafés outside the shows, compare what they have seen and heard, and quickly brainstorm their way to trends.

III

At the big fashion weeks, fashion editors run themselves ragged just as the models do. They record everything inside and outside the shows: the staging, the themes and ideas behind the designs, the styles and color stories, the number of looks on the runway, the key looks, and more. They then turn these notes into feature stories that serve, in effect, as fashion's weather vane.

The March and September issues are the two most important of a fashion magazine's year. Their covers and stories usually come from the spring/summer and autumn/winter fashion weeks in London, New York, Paris and Milan.

Do trends find their way into fashion magazines, or do fashion magazines start the trends?

In the free-spirited hippie era, the way people dressed was shaped by the ideas of the day, and the fashion magazines of the time shared that style. Society, culture and fashion acted on and fed one another until it was almost impossible to say which came first.

A few years ago a crop of magazines devoted to Korean style appeared in China and won over teenage girls. In Japan, fashion magazines fall into 10 main schools. The sweet style, the office-lady style and the street style each aim at a different audience. CanCam, leader of the office-lady school, was for a time hugely successful and created the Yuri Ebihara look: whatever she wore sold out.

Fashion magazines are full of headlines such as "The 5 Hottest Items for Autumn 2015," "The Best Trends of 2014" and "The Best Denim Looks for Chinese New Year."

"One year we made too many purple lipsticks and couldn't sell them, so we found ways to work on fashion editors and get them talking about how popular the color was," an executive at an American cosmetics brand told our reporter. He also admitted that fashion editors are not easy to win over.

In 2009 the fashion industry was mired in the financial crisis. VOGUE teamed up with 13 fashion capitals around the world to stage Fashion's Night Out, purely to get people shopping.

IV

Every season, one of the most important jobs for a fashion brand's PR staff is to get its new catalog to fashion editors at every kind of magazine as fast as possible and invite them to preview the samples, in the hope that they will borrow the sample garments, put them on models and run them in the next issue.

Fashion and luxury brands are a vital link in the whole chain. Cosmetics, clothing, leather goods and jewelry are fixtures in fashion magazines; in other words, they are the magazines' biggest paymasters.

Now even gadgets such as Google Glass and the Apple Watch are seeking tie-ups with fashion. VOGUE was invited to an Apple launch event, and the supermodel Liu Wen appeared on the November cover of VOGUE China wearing the much-discussed Apple Watch, a Celine dress and a matching Celine necklace.

Just as retailers fight over the best spots in a shopping mall, fashion brands fight over the best positions in a magazine. Brands from the same group can band together to negotiate with a magazine, while rivals jostle jealously for favor.

"No magazine editor really likes those thick, oversized fold-out spreads, but brands love them. They think running across several pages makes them look upmarket," a senior fashion magazine executive told our reporter. Fashion editors and brands are locked in a permanent tug of war.

Everything a cover star or inside-page model wears from head to toe is chosen for her by a fashion editor. If a brand is a contracted advertiser, it feels free to dictate the styling; if it is merely supplying clothes for an editor's story, it can only wait its turn quietly to be picked.

Once, the chairman of a luxury group planned a visit to China, and the group's Chinese arm did everything it could to get the cover star of a leading magazine into its clothes. The magazine refused: not everyone suits your clothes, it said; we'll see how they look on our cover star at the fitting.

When the chairman's plane landed and the magazine hit the newsstands, the cover star was, as it happened, wearing the brand. The magazine's explanation: we chose that outfit only because it suited her.

V

At a time when everyone talks about the death of print, fashion magazines' ability to survive may need to be judged apart from that of every other medium.

A study of advertising revenue at Allure, Elle, Glamour, Harper's Bazaar, InStyle and VOGUE from 2009 to 2013 found that only Glamour and Harper's Bazaar ever saw ad revenue fall or stall; the rest grew ever more attractive to advertisers. InStyle and VOGUE in particular saw ad revenue rise year after year.

Brands and fashion magazines depend on each other as closely as lips and teeth, and this has fueled a debate that has run for years: can fashion magazines be bought? A magazine is packed with fashion information, but which of it is editorial and which is advertising?

Editors probably know the difference. Some pages are pure editorial and some are outright paid advertising, but so-called "soft placement" blurs the line, and the whole fashion magazine industry is torn over it.

In 2014 rumor in the industry had it that Dolce & Gabbana, angered by Vanity Fair's coverage of a scandal involving the brand, threatened to pull its advertising from several Condé Nast magazines. Anna Wintour told them no.

Cadace Camille Walton of Georgia Southern University in the United States studied the relationship between fashion magazine content and brands, analyzing the content of VOGUE, GQ, Harper's Bazaar and Esquire. She concluded that it is hard to draw a clear line between a magazine and its brand advertising, and that their ambiguous relationship will always be a subject of debate.

The industry closest of all to fashion magazines is entertainment. The two are practically twins: each boosts the other's earning power, and they make money together.

For a celebrity, a solo magazine cover is a moment of pride. Broadly, a star of a given rank lands a magazine of the same rank, though some reach above themselves and some settle for less, and there is always plenty of gossip behind the scenes. In recent years fashion magazines have been criticized again and again for overusing Photoshop: poreless faces and perfectly curved bodies that look nothing like the real stars.

Entertainment media often count how many magazines a star appeared in during the year, as one measure of whether she is hot. And what the stars on the covers and inside pages wear from head to toe is a business in its own right.

In Friends, Rachel finally lands a job she wants and proudly declares, "I read 30 fashion magazines a month." In Gossip Girl, Queen B is a nervous wreck over an interview with a WWD reporter. Ugly Betty tells the story of a Mexican-American girl fighting her way up in a fashion publishing tower...

The American fashion reality shows Project Runway and America's Next Top Model are favorites of fashion magazines. Marie Claire, Elle and Seventeen have all worked closely with the two shows, on both content and business. Joanna Coles had Marie Claire sponsor six episodes of Project Runway...

Around fashion magazines you meet celebrities, models, designers, photographers and brands without end, all scheming against one another and all depending on one another.

Fashion is a business, and so are fashion magazines. Here the tug of war never stops.

Fashion magazines dazzle. How did they come into our world, bringing beauty and money with them? QDaily interviewed Gu Ming, general manager of Youe.com. She was formerly publisher of ELLE China and a vice president at the fashion brand Coach, where she ran the brand's communications and marketing in China.

Q: How did fashion magazines get started in China? How do fashion magazines relate to fashion trends?

Gu Ming: I started working in fashion magazines in 1998. Back then Chinese people's habits and ways of dressing were still very traditional, and fashion magazines shaped a whole generation's idea of fashion. In 1998, if you picked a young woman at random and asked her about the history of a fashion brand, or about popular culture, she probably knew nothing. Now many young women can reel it all off.

By convention, fashion magazines preview the next season every year in February and August. Some magazines look at the ideas behind it from a cultural angle rather than skimming over what's in style.

Sometimes fashion magazines create the conversation, helping people understand new ideas and accept new trends. Sometimes social and cultural trends shape fashion. The two feed each other.

Q: How do licensed fashion magazines and locally published ones differ in style and in how they are run?

Gu Ming: Licensed fashion magazines bring a lot of resources to the local market, along with basic know-how that local magazines did not have at first.

Licensing brings in the best of many foreign fashion magazines, which benefits the local market and trains people. Chinese fashion editors are far better today than they used to be, and every editor at a fashion magazine now is local. From 1988 to 1998, Elle was made almost entirely in Hong Kong, with very little local content; the international content came from the international edition or from Hong Kong. That hardly happens anymore. Chinese fashion editors have come a long way very quickly.

Q: How do fashion magazines produce content? How do you usually handle coverage that looks the same as everyone else's, on the same topics?

Gu Ming: Fashion magazines usually start working on story ideas a year ahead. Ideas are discussed in three categories: fashion, beauty and features. The usual steps are: pitch the idea, hold a story meeting, then execute. Fashion stories are a bit more complicated. A meticulous magazine will have the models do a fitting first. Sloppier magazines shoot first and fix things in retouching. A good magazine attends to every detail at the early creative stage.

Fashion stories can't avoid looking alike. Each season the new products on the market are much the same; it comes down to who has the better idea, whose production is more polished, who gets bigger-name models and stars to wear the clothes, and who gets better photographers. The competition is real.

Q: How do fashion magazines work with celebrities?

Gu Ming: Celebrities and magazines need each other. Fashion magazines like to feature whoever is hot, and for celebrities, magazines are an important way to reach the public. Once a star becomes popular she has lots of fans, which also helps the magazine sell.

When Faye Wong made her comeback, every fashion magazine wanted her on the cover. In this business a star generally does not appear on two different publications' covers at the same time; the editor-in-chief makes sure of that, and the cover stays secret until the very end. Fashion weeklies generally have more cover slots, since they publish 48 issues a year; monthlies are more selective about cover stars.

Some magazines also have particular celebrity "best friends." Marie Claire championed Liu Wen when she was just starting out, and Grazia likes to promote Zhou Dongyu.

Q: How do you tell hard advertising from soft advertising in fashion magazines?

Gu Ming: A good editor-in-chief weighs commercial interests, the publication's editorial stance and the readers' interests, rather than simply doing what advertisers want. The most extreme form of soft advertising is that some fashion magazines sell their covers to advertisers.

Some advertising people from abroad are surprised that "in China you can buy a fashion magazine cover." Media people abroad all believe the media should stay objective. When you shoot a big spread, you should style the model with products from different brands to show your skill at putting outfits together. If nearly everything on a fashion magazine's cover comes from one brand, you can be 90% sure the cover was sold to an advertiser. In the Chinese market at present, Chinese fashion editors accept this. Abroad it would be unacceptable.

Q: Some fashion magazines are now moving into e-commerce. Will e-commerce affect their content?

Gu Ming: That depends on whether the brand authorizes it. Say a fashion magazine's e-commerce platform strikes a deal with Prada to sell its products. Then there's no problem: the magazine is both a promotional channel and a sales channel. But most of the time brands won't authorize it, not because they are prejudiced against fashion magazines but because they are unsure about China's current e-commerce environment, and they also have to balance their relationships with all the magazines.

No fashion magazine's e-commerce business in China is mature. In China, e-commerce means cheap, and brands can't shoot themselves in the foot by constantly discounting. And if goods sit on a platform unsold, that too ends up hurting the brand's image.

Q: What kind of relationship should fashion magazines and brands have?

Gu Ming: Many people think the relationship between magazines and brands is just advertising, but it isn't that simple. Fashion magazines are about consumption, but they shouldn't lie for brands, because they also have a responsibility to advance the fashion industry. Besides running brand advertising, fashion magazines teach readers how to do their makeup and how to dress, and that helps brands.

Q: Will new media hurt traditional fashion magazines?

Gu Ming: Even with new media springing up everywhere, fashion magazines still matter a great deal. They are beautifully produced, their stories have depth, and their teams are more professional. Fashion magazines aim at a narrow audience, while television and the internet aim at the masses. For a brand, a fashion magazine is the ideal medium for building "brand image."

LV once ran a 60-second ad on television, a move aimed more at getting people talking. A niche brand that needs to protect an overall upmarket image will, when it enters a new market, certainly choose fashion magazines over television.