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Jan 7, 2006
Building A Fashion Empire by Tammy LaGorce
BRANDUSA NIRO, dedicated follower of fashion and publishing mogul, knows a chicette when she sees one, and lately she sees them all over Westchester.
“The Bronxville woman is relaxed but chic — she knows how to be casual,” Ms. Niro said from across the desk in her Manhattan office, adding an emphatic nod of the head that allowed for full appreciation of the highlights in her shapely blond bob. “So is the Scarsdale woman. Eastchester women are extremely well-dressed and very well put together.”
“I’m very proud of Westchester and our ladies,” she added.
Bronxville may not be the first place designers like Narciso Rodriguez, Zac Posen and Donatella Versace think of as they prepare for runway shows each season. But Ms. Niro, 48, who lives there and is editor in chief of The Daily, The Daily Mini, fashionweekdaily.com and a developing cavalcade of other fashion-focused publications, is by no means a stranger to them.
At fashion shows, she is seated in the front row, alongside friends like Glenda Bailey of Harper’s Bazaar and Linda Wells of Allure. In an article in Vanity Fair, her friend Graydon Carter, the magazine’s editor, called The Daily “the guiltiest pleasure of Fashion Week in New York.”
What is shaping up to be an empire for Ms. Niro began in 2002 with The Daily, a newsy leaflet handed to guests on their way into tents during Fashion Week. Now her eight-month-old Daily Mini, a purse-size monthly magazine, has expanded outside New York to Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston and Miami.
Ms. Niro had been honing her fashion and business sense long before The Daily took off. From 1996 to 1998 she consulted for The New Yorker under Tina Brown’s fashion-friendly editorship. But then, she said, “I decided I wanted to start something, and I came up with the idea of a news wire.”
“I just felt things in fashion were too stiff; the upper lip was too stiff,” Ms. Niro continued. “So I said to myself, ‘Be playful. Do this in an entertaining way.’ ” In 1999, she started Fashion Wire Daily, a precursor to The Daily. But just as the news wire was beginning to make a profit, she said, the 9/11 attacks happened.
“The whole thing sort of fell apart,” she said. “No one wanted to syndicate something fashiony after 9/11.” So Ms. Niro opted out in 2002, around the time that she and her husband, a photographer, moved from Manhattan to Bronxville, where they had bought “a huge, gorgeous co-op that was in shambles — kind of like what I grew up in in Romania,” she said.
“I thought I could just stop,” she said. “You know how you say to yourself, ‘I’ll write a novel?’ ”
She found she could not stop, though, and The Daily was born in November 2002, just months after she took her idea for the magazine to executives at IMG, the company that runs many of the fashion industry’s most gossiped-about events.
“It started from the desire of fashion insiders to get our fix,” she said. It quickly became known among fashionistas — who were handed free copies on their way into tents — for its frothy, but not gossipy, dispatches straight from the scene. “It was so targeted, and it made so much sense,” Ms. Niro said. “It was also really gratifying, because I could go to the shows and see people just loving the magazine.”
Francisco Costa, Calvin Klein’s creative director, is a big fan. “Brandusa has taken The Daily from a freebie at Fashion Week to a publication that everyone in the industry is talking about,” he said. “It combines irreverence with serious news — I think it’s a potential powerhouse.”
According to Ms. Niro’s calculations, The Daily’s guaranteed circulation is up from 15,000 at its start to 25,000 as of the most recent issue. The New York edition of the Daily Mini, a photo-crammed fashion insider’s tell-all that favors thought bubbles and 100-words-or-less articles, also has a guaranteed circulation of 25,000, a number she would like to boost to 75,000 by 2008.
Meanwhile, fashionweekdaily.com gets 160,000 visitors per month in addition to its 30,000 daily subscribers, and it also provides Web-based fashion content for MSN.com.
Ms.Niro’s expansion plans are enough to cause other editors’ heads to spin: She and her staff are completing a Daily for Moscow’s Fashion Week and will introduce new editions of the Daily Mini in Mexico, Argentina and Peru this year, starting with April’s Best of Runway issues. Just a few days ago, The Daily acquired Tennis Week and its Web site, tennisweek.com. And a weekly television show based on The Daily Mini, Ms. Niro said, is “not solid but very likely to happen this year.”
All of this does not leave Ms. Niro with much time to relax around Bronxville or at her weekend house in Gardiner, N.Y. But she does enjoy the “great little French movies” that are shown at a Bronxville theater, when she can.
And there is always time for shopping.
“We have a beautiful shoe store in Bronxville called Plaza Too,” she said with the air of someone used to handing out endorsements. “And there’s a clothes store you can go to in Eastchester if you’re looking for a real bargain. It’s called Fox’s.”
nytimes.com
Building A Fashion Empire by Tammy LaGorce
BRANDUSA NIRO, dedicated follower of fashion and publishing mogul, knows a chicette when she sees one, and lately she sees them all over Westchester.
“The Bronxville woman is relaxed but chic — she knows how to be casual,” Ms. Niro said from across the desk in her Manhattan office, adding an emphatic nod of the head that allowed for full appreciation of the highlights in her shapely blond bob. “So is the Scarsdale woman. Eastchester women are extremely well-dressed and very well put together.”
“I’m very proud of Westchester and our ladies,” she added.
Bronxville may not be the first place designers like Narciso Rodriguez, Zac Posen and Donatella Versace think of as they prepare for runway shows each season. But Ms. Niro, 48, who lives there and is editor in chief of The Daily, The Daily Mini, fashionweekdaily.com and a developing cavalcade of other fashion-focused publications, is by no means a stranger to them.
At fashion shows, she is seated in the front row, alongside friends like Glenda Bailey of Harper’s Bazaar and Linda Wells of Allure. In an article in Vanity Fair, her friend Graydon Carter, the magazine’s editor, called The Daily “the guiltiest pleasure of Fashion Week in New York.”
What is shaping up to be an empire for Ms. Niro began in 2002 with The Daily, a newsy leaflet handed to guests on their way into tents during Fashion Week. Now her eight-month-old Daily Mini, a purse-size monthly magazine, has expanded outside New York to Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston and Miami.
Ms. Niro had been honing her fashion and business sense long before The Daily took off. From 1996 to 1998 she consulted for The New Yorker under Tina Brown’s fashion-friendly editorship. But then, she said, “I decided I wanted to start something, and I came up with the idea of a news wire.”
“I just felt things in fashion were too stiff; the upper lip was too stiff,” Ms. Niro continued. “So I said to myself, ‘Be playful. Do this in an entertaining way.’ ” In 1999, she started Fashion Wire Daily, a precursor to The Daily. But just as the news wire was beginning to make a profit, she said, the 9/11 attacks happened.
“The whole thing sort of fell apart,” she said. “No one wanted to syndicate something fashiony after 9/11.” So Ms. Niro opted out in 2002, around the time that she and her husband, a photographer, moved from Manhattan to Bronxville, where they had bought “a huge, gorgeous co-op that was in shambles — kind of like what I grew up in in Romania,” she said.
“I thought I could just stop,” she said. “You know how you say to yourself, ‘I’ll write a novel?’ ”
She found she could not stop, though, and The Daily was born in November 2002, just months after she took her idea for the magazine to executives at IMG, the company that runs many of the fashion industry’s most gossiped-about events.
“It started from the desire of fashion insiders to get our fix,” she said. It quickly became known among fashionistas — who were handed free copies on their way into tents — for its frothy, but not gossipy, dispatches straight from the scene. “It was so targeted, and it made so much sense,” Ms. Niro said. “It was also really gratifying, because I could go to the shows and see people just loving the magazine.”
Francisco Costa, Calvin Klein’s creative director, is a big fan. “Brandusa has taken The Daily from a freebie at Fashion Week to a publication that everyone in the industry is talking about,” he said. “It combines irreverence with serious news — I think it’s a potential powerhouse.”
According to Ms. Niro’s calculations, The Daily’s guaranteed circulation is up from 15,000 at its start to 25,000 as of the most recent issue. The New York edition of the Daily Mini, a photo-crammed fashion insider’s tell-all that favors thought bubbles and 100-words-or-less articles, also has a guaranteed circulation of 25,000, a number she would like to boost to 75,000 by 2008.
Meanwhile, fashionweekdaily.com gets 160,000 visitors per month in addition to its 30,000 daily subscribers, and it also provides Web-based fashion content for MSN.com.
Ms.Niro’s expansion plans are enough to cause other editors’ heads to spin: She and her staff are completing a Daily for Moscow’s Fashion Week and will introduce new editions of the Daily Mini in Mexico, Argentina and Peru this year, starting with April’s Best of Runway issues. Just a few days ago, The Daily acquired Tennis Week and its Web site, tennisweek.com. And a weekly television show based on The Daily Mini, Ms. Niro said, is “not solid but very likely to happen this year.”
All of this does not leave Ms. Niro with much time to relax around Bronxville or at her weekend house in Gardiner, N.Y. But she does enjoy the “great little French movies” that are shown at a Bronxville theater, when she can.
And there is always time for shopping.
“We have a beautiful shoe store in Bronxville called Plaza Too,” she said with the air of someone used to handing out endorsements. “And there’s a clothes store you can go to in Eastchester if you’re looking for a real bargain. It’s called Fox’s.”
nytimes.com
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