The Business of Magazines
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Vince Aletti Has Issues
Collector and critic Vince Aletti has been amassing heaps and piles of magazines for decades. Now he’s compiling his trove—particularly a photo-heavy look at the history of fashion—in a new book.
by William Van Meter April 22, 2019 8:30 a.m. ET
It’s hard not to be overwhelmed on one’s first visit to curator and writer Vince Aletti’s New York apartment. It isn’t so much a living space as a repository for his vast collections. Precarious towers of vintage magazines spread and grow like kudzu, some reaching the ceiling. The fireplace is filled with periodicals, and there is room for only one very slim person to perch on the couch. At times, it’s necessary to turn sideways and crab walk.
“I’m a little overwhelmed myself,” Aletti, 74, admits as he gives a tour, noting what the rooms used to be before they ceded to his collections. Aletti, who has lived in this East Village prewar since 1976, began amassing this fashion magazine cache in the 1970s, and in a sense, he has been working on his latest book ever since. Out this spring from Phaidon, Issues: A History of Photography in Fashion Magazines is a 468-page compendium of magazines dating back to 1925, all but two sourced from Aletti’s archives (acquired through a combination of now-defunct vintage ephemera shows and flea markets, back-date magazine stores, subscriptions and online scouring). In a world where seemingly any archival image is available online, on Instagram or Pinterest, Issues is a testament to the abundance of marvelous photographs that haven’t been digitized, that are out there in the yellowing-hard-copy form.
“He gets to the soul of things,” says the filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland, who has borrowed items from Aletti for her documentaries, such as Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, on the revered 1960s Vogue editor (her husband’s grandmother). “One of my things is going into dusty archives and uncovering things,” she says. “He’s living with it. He’s made it part of his life, which I think is part of the way he thinks and the way that he dissects things. He doesn’t just look at something straight on; it becomes part of the dialogue of his life. It’s not just about fashion photography, it’s about cultural history. He’s so well-versed in the language of every photographer and how their work was impacted by the cultural times.”
“[Issues] isn’t the definitive list of 100 magazines,” Aletti says. “It is an incredibly personal selection that’s super subjective, but every one of them stands up and is worth spending some time with.” Photographs of the magazines’ layouts are accompanied by Aletti’s spare and informative introductory prose, his critic’s voice—he reviewed photograpy for the New Yorker and the Village Voice for years—calling attention to the images’ many references. For example, of Clifford Coffin’s 1949 Vogue photograph of swimsuit-clad women, he writes, “Coffin’s arrangement of four seated figures on a sand dune, their backs to us and their brightly colored bathing caps like signposts receding into the distance, recalls René Magritte and anticipates Pop art at its glossiest.”
“I decided to focus on what was important about that particular issue,” Aletti says, “and what it revealed about the time and the work that’s in it, but also the sort of larger picture with what was going on when it came out—seeing how what was in there reflected what was going on outside of the magazine.”
Issues draws mainly on women’s magazines, especially different iterations of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, but also features men’s titles, such as Per Lui, Fantastic Man and GQ. The selection can be idiosyncratic: iis not represented by its 1970s heyday but by a single fashion-forward issue from 2010. Much of the book is devoted to the 1940s through the 1960s, with the 1970s and 1980s seemingly underrepresented. “The ’80s was not a very good time for magazine design,” Aletti explains. “It was just a bad period, so I wanted to sort of move past that.” Twenty-first-century magazines make up about a third of the book—the final issue is a 2018 Document Journal. “There’s a lot of great work still being done,” Aletti says. “I didn’t want to make it just a historical project. I wanted to emphasize the creativity of what’s going on now.”
Locating the magazines within Aletti’s archive was a singular task. “For the most part he knows where they are,” says Andrew Roth, a frequent Aletti collaborator who edited Issues with Phaidon’s Sara Bader. “If he doesn’t, then he spends a week or two finding it.” But narrowing down the selection was an odyssey.
“What I had to keep driving home was that it can’t just be about great photography,” Roth says. “It can’t just be about specific images. It has to be the entire magazine as an object—where the great photographer, the designer, the editor and the cover all coalesced.”
“Most fashion pictures don’t exist one by one,” Aletti says. “They don’t just stand alone in a frame. They work on the page. And a lot of the best photographers really understand the page. [Richard] Avedon, [Irving] Penn, Steven Meisel—they really understand the magazine and work for that space. To see things isolated from that space is one way to absorb them, but you don’t really get the whole impact of the work the way you would in a magazine. So it became more and more important for me to show not just [Avedon’s 1955 Harper’s Bazaar photo] Dovima With Elephants, but the opposite page.” (In this case, it was Dovima in a different Dior dress, again with the pachyderms.)
Alongside titans like Helmut Newton and Horst P. Horst, lesser-known talents are featured—such as Toni Frissell, a female fashion photographer of the 1930s and ’40s who specialized in portraying women in active, adventuresome contexts. Her 1941 shot of a model in an evening dress ethereally floating in a dolphin tank at Florida’s Marineland manages to combine athleticism with a dreamy elegance. Melodie McDaniel, one of only a few women of color working in fashion photography in the ’90s, is represented by a spare, cinematic black-and-white fashion story from a 1995 issue of L’Uomo Vogue.
Flipping through Issues, one is struck over and over again, not by how outdated these magazines are, but by how thoroughly modern and ahead-of-their-time they were. “The editors and the designers were sophisticated,” Aletti says. “They were assuming that they had a sophisticated audience, for the most part smart and wealthy, that they were going to help further educate. They weren’t speaking down to anyone. They assumed that people went to the theater, were interested in books and art. And if [their readers] didn’t, [the editors and designers] probably did not care. They were editing something that they were proud of and put forward their idea of the world.”
In particular, the World War II–era magazines stand out as a watershed, the escapism and fantasy of fashion grounded by hard glimpses of reality. A 1946 Harper’s Bazaar issue featured Henri Cartier-Bresson’s devastating portrait of a child in an oversize coat wandering through a displaced persons camp in Europe. “I see them as historical records of a very particular period, especially the war years,” Aletti says of the magazines. Fashion photographers like Cecil Beaton and Lee Miller became war correspondents. “Lee Miller’s pictures of bodies in a concentration camp, and Nazis having committed suicide—this really powerful raw material that clearly Vogue decided its readers needed to see,” says Aletti, “that they weren’t going to pretend this wasn’t happening. They weren’t coddling their reader.
“American women could not ignore what was going on in the war. The magazines stepped up and understood that they were part of the ongoing lives of their readers,” he continues. “Women were working in a way that they had never worked before, all these kinds of restrictions on clothing and food and all these things that the magazines had to acknowledge.”
Whereas other authors would highlight Dior’s postwar New Look, Aletti examines fashion photography’s postwar realist turn. “All the sort of decorative froufrou stuff that happened before the war looked out of date immediately after,” he says. “There had to be a kind of readjustment and something that was much more straightforward and reportorial.” Junior Bazaar, the short-lived Harper’s Bazaar offshoot aimed at younger readers, tapped into this spirit. One of its key photographers was Hermann Landshoff, a German-Jewish refugee. A colorful 1945 shoot he did for the magazine, featuring models in front of graphic advertisement-like backdrops, captures the mix of optimism and consumerism of the time.
Aletti himself is proudly a fashion outsider. (He recalls going to the maverick designer Stephen Sprouse’s 1984 show at the Ritz nightclub. “No one was gonna invite me to Calvin Klein,” he says and laughs.) So fashion itself was not a factor for inclusion in the book, whose focus is photography, art direction and context. “I’m sure certain fashion insiders will miss that point of view,” he says. “Certainly, the Irving Penn Paris collections images [from 1950 French, British and American Vogue] are extraordinary, because the clothing is extraordinary. But I’m not writing about that. I’m writing about the images. I don’t know anything about fashion, except what I’ve absorbed along the way.”
Aletti has made a name for himself as New York’s éminence grise of photography. In addition to penning criticism, he is a prolific writer of forewords for photo books and has curated many exhibits at institutions such as the International Center of Photography. His show Male at White Columns in 2008 comprised images from his photo collection, which is mostly skewed toward the male form and masculinity.
Aletti has lent photos and magazines to many films and exhibits, including the Metropolitan Museum, most recently for the 2017 show Irving Penn: Centennial. Jeff Rosenheim, the curator in charge of the department of photographs, knows him well. “Vince’s generosity really makes my colleagues’ and my work so much easier, because we know that if we’re in a jam Vince will come through for us,” he says. “He sees his archive as a historical monument, but also as a working tool for the field. And that’s both rare and exciting for those of us on the museum side of things.”
The photographers Aletti collects are a mix of fashion greats and a pantheon of downtown bohemianism, such as David Sims, Meisel, Saul Leiter, Lillian Bassman, George Platt Lynes, Nan Goldin and Jack Pierson. “None by Avedon or Penn or the historical figures discussed in the book—except a small Cecil Beaton,” he says. “But I have a great collection of those great photographers in the magazines—including a ton of work they edited out of their own history.”
He rearranges the photos on the walls of his apartment periodically, but a silvery-tinged Peter Hujar portrait of a shirtless young man named Manny Vasquez retains the same prominent spot. “He was a boyfriend of mine,” Aletti says. “He died of AIDS.” Vasquez is in other works on the walls, and there is a strip of photo-booth snapshots of him with Aletti. In the photos, Aletti is slim and handsome with a disco mustache. Hujar was a dear friend and lived across the street until he died of AIDS in 1987. At last year’s symposium for the Morgan Library’s Hujar retrospective, Aletti read aloud the Village Voice obituary he wrote for the photographer.
“When New York was at its best, Vince was in the middle of it,” says Immordino Vreeland, “with all these different creative forces, a lot of [whom have] also disappeared. But he lived through these things, and he lived through the pain of losing a lot of people around him. He’s always stuck to this vision of purity of what he loved and what he was passionate about and also caring for it in a very thoughtful way and preserving it.”
Aletti grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and as a child, he collected stamps. “It was always about graphics and visual elements,” he says. His magazine obsession kicked in when he was a student at Antioch College, in Ohio, in the 1960s. He names the April 1965 issue of Harper’s Bazaar that Avedon guest-edited, delving into space exploration, the Beatles and Bob Dylan, as the one that got him hooked. It’s still his favorite.
“Initially, it was because I got really interested in Avedon and Penn,” he says. “I realized how much there was in those magazines that I hadn’t seen in any of their books. I felt like it was a way to just get deeper into their work, to get a sense of how they worked year by year, month by month. It started with just a few key issues, thinking this is a great issue, I really should have this, and then wanting to make it complete and see what happened in between the great issues. And then obviously getting into all the other people who were working at the same time and seeing who was consistent, who sort of was a slacker, who was really surprising from month to month.”
Aletti moved to New York in 1968. While working at the Peace Eye bookstore, he started contributing music pieces to the underground newspaper the Rat, which led to freelancing for more established publications of the nascent music press. “I did a lot of regular reviewing at Rolling Stone, mostly about black music,” Aletti says. He was also one of the first writers on the disco beat, penning an early piece for Rolling Stone and a regular column in Record World. He spent a lot of time at dance clubs. “Mostly I went to Paradise Garage,” he says. “I could see all my friends, hear new music and hang out in the booth.” He worked for two years as head of the A&R department at the Warner Bros. subsidiary RFC Records and then in retail at Tower Records when it opened in Greenwich Village.
In 1985, Aletti joined the Village Voice and spent the next two decades as an editor and writer there. “They let a writer pursue areas of interest,” he says. “I reviewed all kinds of stuff while I was there and little by little started focusing on photography, moved away from music.” He quit the Voice in 2005 and for the next 11 years regularly reviewed photography exhibits for the New Yorker. He left to devote his time to Issues.
Aletti is now contemplating his next book and, of course, still scouring eBay for new finds. “I’m always looking for things,” he says. “I’m always searching.”
source | wsj
images from the book are available online.
Collector and critic Vince Aletti has been amassing heaps and piles of magazines for decades. Now he’s compiling his trove—particularly a photo-heavy look at the history of fashion—in a new book.
by William Van Meter April 22, 2019 8:30 a.m. ET
It’s hard not to be overwhelmed on one’s first visit to curator and writer Vince Aletti’s New York apartment. It isn’t so much a living space as a repository for his vast collections. Precarious towers of vintage magazines spread and grow like kudzu, some reaching the ceiling. The fireplace is filled with periodicals, and there is room for only one very slim person to perch on the couch. At times, it’s necessary to turn sideways and crab walk.
“I’m a little overwhelmed myself,” Aletti, 74, admits as he gives a tour, noting what the rooms used to be before they ceded to his collections. Aletti, who has lived in this East Village prewar since 1976, began amassing this fashion magazine cache in the 1970s, and in a sense, he has been working on his latest book ever since. Out this spring from Phaidon, Issues: A History of Photography in Fashion Magazines is a 468-page compendium of magazines dating back to 1925, all but two sourced from Aletti’s archives (acquired through a combination of now-defunct vintage ephemera shows and flea markets, back-date magazine stores, subscriptions and online scouring). In a world where seemingly any archival image is available online, on Instagram or Pinterest, Issues is a testament to the abundance of marvelous photographs that haven’t been digitized, that are out there in the yellowing-hard-copy form.
“He gets to the soul of things,” says the filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland, who has borrowed items from Aletti for her documentaries, such as Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, on the revered 1960s Vogue editor (her husband’s grandmother). “One of my things is going into dusty archives and uncovering things,” she says. “He’s living with it. He’s made it part of his life, which I think is part of the way he thinks and the way that he dissects things. He doesn’t just look at something straight on; it becomes part of the dialogue of his life. It’s not just about fashion photography, it’s about cultural history. He’s so well-versed in the language of every photographer and how their work was impacted by the cultural times.”
“[Issues] isn’t the definitive list of 100 magazines,” Aletti says. “It is an incredibly personal selection that’s super subjective, but every one of them stands up and is worth spending some time with.” Photographs of the magazines’ layouts are accompanied by Aletti’s spare and informative introductory prose, his critic’s voice—he reviewed photograpy for the New Yorker and the Village Voice for years—calling attention to the images’ many references. For example, of Clifford Coffin’s 1949 Vogue photograph of swimsuit-clad women, he writes, “Coffin’s arrangement of four seated figures on a sand dune, their backs to us and their brightly colored bathing caps like signposts receding into the distance, recalls René Magritte and anticipates Pop art at its glossiest.”
“I decided to focus on what was important about that particular issue,” Aletti says, “and what it revealed about the time and the work that’s in it, but also the sort of larger picture with what was going on when it came out—seeing how what was in there reflected what was going on outside of the magazine.”
Issues draws mainly on women’s magazines, especially different iterations of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, but also features men’s titles, such as Per Lui, Fantastic Man and GQ. The selection can be idiosyncratic: iis not represented by its 1970s heyday but by a single fashion-forward issue from 2010. Much of the book is devoted to the 1940s through the 1960s, with the 1970s and 1980s seemingly underrepresented. “The ’80s was not a very good time for magazine design,” Aletti explains. “It was just a bad period, so I wanted to sort of move past that.” Twenty-first-century magazines make up about a third of the book—the final issue is a 2018 Document Journal. “There’s a lot of great work still being done,” Aletti says. “I didn’t want to make it just a historical project. I wanted to emphasize the creativity of what’s going on now.”
Locating the magazines within Aletti’s archive was a singular task. “For the most part he knows where they are,” says Andrew Roth, a frequent Aletti collaborator who edited Issues with Phaidon’s Sara Bader. “If he doesn’t, then he spends a week or two finding it.” But narrowing down the selection was an odyssey.
“What I had to keep driving home was that it can’t just be about great photography,” Roth says. “It can’t just be about specific images. It has to be the entire magazine as an object—where the great photographer, the designer, the editor and the cover all coalesced.”
“Most fashion pictures don’t exist one by one,” Aletti says. “They don’t just stand alone in a frame. They work on the page. And a lot of the best photographers really understand the page. [Richard] Avedon, [Irving] Penn, Steven Meisel—they really understand the magazine and work for that space. To see things isolated from that space is one way to absorb them, but you don’t really get the whole impact of the work the way you would in a magazine. So it became more and more important for me to show not just [Avedon’s 1955 Harper’s Bazaar photo] Dovima With Elephants, but the opposite page.” (In this case, it was Dovima in a different Dior dress, again with the pachyderms.)
Alongside titans like Helmut Newton and Horst P. Horst, lesser-known talents are featured—such as Toni Frissell, a female fashion photographer of the 1930s and ’40s who specialized in portraying women in active, adventuresome contexts. Her 1941 shot of a model in an evening dress ethereally floating in a dolphin tank at Florida’s Marineland manages to combine athleticism with a dreamy elegance. Melodie McDaniel, one of only a few women of color working in fashion photography in the ’90s, is represented by a spare, cinematic black-and-white fashion story from a 1995 issue of L’Uomo Vogue.
Flipping through Issues, one is struck over and over again, not by how outdated these magazines are, but by how thoroughly modern and ahead-of-their-time they were. “The editors and the designers were sophisticated,” Aletti says. “They were assuming that they had a sophisticated audience, for the most part smart and wealthy, that they were going to help further educate. They weren’t speaking down to anyone. They assumed that people went to the theater, were interested in books and art. And if [their readers] didn’t, [the editors and designers] probably did not care. They were editing something that they were proud of and put forward their idea of the world.”
In particular, the World War II–era magazines stand out as a watershed, the escapism and fantasy of fashion grounded by hard glimpses of reality. A 1946 Harper’s Bazaar issue featured Henri Cartier-Bresson’s devastating portrait of a child in an oversize coat wandering through a displaced persons camp in Europe. “I see them as historical records of a very particular period, especially the war years,” Aletti says of the magazines. Fashion photographers like Cecil Beaton and Lee Miller became war correspondents. “Lee Miller’s pictures of bodies in a concentration camp, and Nazis having committed suicide—this really powerful raw material that clearly Vogue decided its readers needed to see,” says Aletti, “that they weren’t going to pretend this wasn’t happening. They weren’t coddling their reader.
“American women could not ignore what was going on in the war. The magazines stepped up and understood that they were part of the ongoing lives of their readers,” he continues. “Women were working in a way that they had never worked before, all these kinds of restrictions on clothing and food and all these things that the magazines had to acknowledge.”
Whereas other authors would highlight Dior’s postwar New Look, Aletti examines fashion photography’s postwar realist turn. “All the sort of decorative froufrou stuff that happened before the war looked out of date immediately after,” he says. “There had to be a kind of readjustment and something that was much more straightforward and reportorial.” Junior Bazaar, the short-lived Harper’s Bazaar offshoot aimed at younger readers, tapped into this spirit. One of its key photographers was Hermann Landshoff, a German-Jewish refugee. A colorful 1945 shoot he did for the magazine, featuring models in front of graphic advertisement-like backdrops, captures the mix of optimism and consumerism of the time.
Aletti himself is proudly a fashion outsider. (He recalls going to the maverick designer Stephen Sprouse’s 1984 show at the Ritz nightclub. “No one was gonna invite me to Calvin Klein,” he says and laughs.) So fashion itself was not a factor for inclusion in the book, whose focus is photography, art direction and context. “I’m sure certain fashion insiders will miss that point of view,” he says. “Certainly, the Irving Penn Paris collections images [from 1950 French, British and American Vogue] are extraordinary, because the clothing is extraordinary. But I’m not writing about that. I’m writing about the images. I don’t know anything about fashion, except what I’ve absorbed along the way.”
Aletti has made a name for himself as New York’s éminence grise of photography. In addition to penning criticism, he is a prolific writer of forewords for photo books and has curated many exhibits at institutions such as the International Center of Photography. His show Male at White Columns in 2008 comprised images from his photo collection, which is mostly skewed toward the male form and masculinity.
Aletti has lent photos and magazines to many films and exhibits, including the Metropolitan Museum, most recently for the 2017 show Irving Penn: Centennial. Jeff Rosenheim, the curator in charge of the department of photographs, knows him well. “Vince’s generosity really makes my colleagues’ and my work so much easier, because we know that if we’re in a jam Vince will come through for us,” he says. “He sees his archive as a historical monument, but also as a working tool for the field. And that’s both rare and exciting for those of us on the museum side of things.”
The photographers Aletti collects are a mix of fashion greats and a pantheon of downtown bohemianism, such as David Sims, Meisel, Saul Leiter, Lillian Bassman, George Platt Lynes, Nan Goldin and Jack Pierson. “None by Avedon or Penn or the historical figures discussed in the book—except a small Cecil Beaton,” he says. “But I have a great collection of those great photographers in the magazines—including a ton of work they edited out of their own history.”
He rearranges the photos on the walls of his apartment periodically, but a silvery-tinged Peter Hujar portrait of a shirtless young man named Manny Vasquez retains the same prominent spot. “He was a boyfriend of mine,” Aletti says. “He died of AIDS.” Vasquez is in other works on the walls, and there is a strip of photo-booth snapshots of him with Aletti. In the photos, Aletti is slim and handsome with a disco mustache. Hujar was a dear friend and lived across the street until he died of AIDS in 1987. At last year’s symposium for the Morgan Library’s Hujar retrospective, Aletti read aloud the Village Voice obituary he wrote for the photographer.
“When New York was at its best, Vince was in the middle of it,” says Immordino Vreeland, “with all these different creative forces, a lot of [whom have] also disappeared. But he lived through these things, and he lived through the pain of losing a lot of people around him. He’s always stuck to this vision of purity of what he loved and what he was passionate about and also caring for it in a very thoughtful way and preserving it.”
Aletti grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and as a child, he collected stamps. “It was always about graphics and visual elements,” he says. His magazine obsession kicked in when he was a student at Antioch College, in Ohio, in the 1960s. He names the April 1965 issue of Harper’s Bazaar that Avedon guest-edited, delving into space exploration, the Beatles and Bob Dylan, as the one that got him hooked. It’s still his favorite.
“Initially, it was because I got really interested in Avedon and Penn,” he says. “I realized how much there was in those magazines that I hadn’t seen in any of their books. I felt like it was a way to just get deeper into their work, to get a sense of how they worked year by year, month by month. It started with just a few key issues, thinking this is a great issue, I really should have this, and then wanting to make it complete and see what happened in between the great issues. And then obviously getting into all the other people who were working at the same time and seeing who was consistent, who sort of was a slacker, who was really surprising from month to month.”
Aletti moved to New York in 1968. While working at the Peace Eye bookstore, he started contributing music pieces to the underground newspaper the Rat, which led to freelancing for more established publications of the nascent music press. “I did a lot of regular reviewing at Rolling Stone, mostly about black music,” Aletti says. He was also one of the first writers on the disco beat, penning an early piece for Rolling Stone and a regular column in Record World. He spent a lot of time at dance clubs. “Mostly I went to Paradise Garage,” he says. “I could see all my friends, hear new music and hang out in the booth.” He worked for two years as head of the A&R department at the Warner Bros. subsidiary RFC Records and then in retail at Tower Records when it opened in Greenwich Village.
In 1985, Aletti joined the Village Voice and spent the next two decades as an editor and writer there. “They let a writer pursue areas of interest,” he says. “I reviewed all kinds of stuff while I was there and little by little started focusing on photography, moved away from music.” He quit the Voice in 2005 and for the next 11 years regularly reviewed photography exhibits for the New Yorker. He left to devote his time to Issues.
Aletti is now contemplating his next book and, of course, still scouring eBay for new finds. “I’m always looking for things,” he says. “I’m always searching.”
source | wsj
images from the book are available online.
Vince Aletti’s Obsessive Collection of Seminal Fashion Magazines
Another article about Aletti; it has some photos of his collection, including a couple pics from a 1950 Vogue Paris issue
Another article about Aletti; it has some photos of his collection, including a couple pics from a 1950 Vogue Paris issue
I most definitely must crystalize more which magazines are worth buying and saving and which ones aren't.
Xone
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She sounds hurt and not very smart...how is her website doing?
StoneSkipper
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caioherrero
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I thought he would become the fashion director at british vogue. Who is gonna be now?
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Fingers crossed Alastair McKimm can turn i-D around, and make it into the cutting-edge publication that it once was. I lost interest in i-D a number of years ago, and it has become a shadow of its former self of late. I'm keen to see what McKimm will do!
Benn98
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No wonder Lucy left!!
Net-a-porter Re-Thinks Content and Video, Shrinks Porter Magazine
The retailer is seeking to capture customers’ attention with more video and podcasts, and plans to publish Porter magazine twice a year.
By Samantha Conti on May 10, 2019
LONDON – Net-a-porter is looking to appeal to customers’ eyes – and ears – with a bigger focus on video, podcasts and digital content, as it reduces the frequency of its print title Porter to twice a year, WWD has learned.
The retailer said it has been witnessing an “explosive growth” in digital consumption and engagement and, in response, plans to open new video studios and editing suites in a bid to produce socially-led content with speed and agility.
The move makes sense, the company said, as the shopper who watches, reads and listens to content spends about 10 percent more than the one who has not been exposed to content.
Those digitally-engaged shoppers are also increasingly discovering and connecting with fashion through social media and influencers. Since last year, Net said, its digital audience reach has grown approximately 1.5 times, with reader engagement increasing nearly 50 percent. Some 50 percent of Net’s total orders are now being placed via mobile devices.
In addition to the video studios, Net said it is planning to increase its investment in podcasts, in more personalized and localized content, and in re-designing its daily content offering on the app, which is being re-designed.
Concurrent with the increased shift to digital, the print magazine Porter will publish as a global bi-annual “event edition” with guest editors and limited-edition cover treatments. Going forward, the magazine will highlight brand franchises such as Incredible Women.
The magazine currently comes out six times a year, and the summer escape issue will be published in June. It will be followed by the new bi-annual issue in early spring 2020.
“As a digital pure-play business with content at our heart, we are committed to delivering the most engaging experience and service to our customers,” said Alison Loehnis, president Net-a-porter and Mr Porter. “To that end, we are further ramping up our digital output, with increased investment across video, podcasts and social to ensure that our content offering remains innovative and market-leading.”
Loehnis added that Net’s editorial voice “remains integral to our business, allowing us to celebrate Incredible Women and Incredible Fashion, while giving heart to our brand values. This is something we treasure and are committed to preserving.”
The glossy magazine Porter, with its lush fashion shoots and long-form features launched in February 2014 as a bimonthly. Earlier this year its founding editor and global content director Lucy Yeomans, and its publisher Tess Macleod Smith, left the title.
The move to reduce Porter’s frequency – and put a bigger focus on digital content – dovetails with parent company Richemont’s push into the e-commerce space and into emerging markets such as China. It also chimes with news and media organizations’ shift to digital over print.
Net already has a weekly digital magazine, The Edit, in addition to Porter. It has also created the Porter Digital platform, which brings all of its media outlets together. The content is also translated into four languages — English, French, German and Mandarin — in line with the company’s global outlook.
WWD
Net-a-porter Re-Thinks Content and Video, Shrinks Porter Magazine
The retailer is seeking to capture customers’ attention with more video and podcasts, and plans to publish Porter magazine twice a year.
By Samantha Conti on May 10, 2019
LONDON – Net-a-porter is looking to appeal to customers’ eyes – and ears – with a bigger focus on video, podcasts and digital content, as it reduces the frequency of its print title Porter to twice a year, WWD has learned.
The retailer said it has been witnessing an “explosive growth” in digital consumption and engagement and, in response, plans to open new video studios and editing suites in a bid to produce socially-led content with speed and agility.
The move makes sense, the company said, as the shopper who watches, reads and listens to content spends about 10 percent more than the one who has not been exposed to content.
Those digitally-engaged shoppers are also increasingly discovering and connecting with fashion through social media and influencers. Since last year, Net said, its digital audience reach has grown approximately 1.5 times, with reader engagement increasing nearly 50 percent. Some 50 percent of Net’s total orders are now being placed via mobile devices.
In addition to the video studios, Net said it is planning to increase its investment in podcasts, in more personalized and localized content, and in re-designing its daily content offering on the app, which is being re-designed.
Concurrent with the increased shift to digital, the print magazine Porter will publish as a global bi-annual “event edition” with guest editors and limited-edition cover treatments. Going forward, the magazine will highlight brand franchises such as Incredible Women.
The magazine currently comes out six times a year, and the summer escape issue will be published in June. It will be followed by the new bi-annual issue in early spring 2020.
“As a digital pure-play business with content at our heart, we are committed to delivering the most engaging experience and service to our customers,” said Alison Loehnis, president Net-a-porter and Mr Porter. “To that end, we are further ramping up our digital output, with increased investment across video, podcasts and social to ensure that our content offering remains innovative and market-leading.”
Loehnis added that Net’s editorial voice “remains integral to our business, allowing us to celebrate Incredible Women and Incredible Fashion, while giving heart to our brand values. This is something we treasure and are committed to preserving.”
The glossy magazine Porter, with its lush fashion shoots and long-form features launched in February 2014 as a bimonthly. Earlier this year its founding editor and global content director Lucy Yeomans, and its publisher Tess Macleod Smith, left the title.
The move to reduce Porter’s frequency – and put a bigger focus on digital content – dovetails with parent company Richemont’s push into the e-commerce space and into emerging markets such as China. It also chimes with news and media organizations’ shift to digital over print.
Net already has a weekly digital magazine, The Edit, in addition to Porter. It has also created the Porter Digital platform, which brings all of its media outlets together. The content is also translated into four languages — English, French, German and Mandarin — in line with the company’s global outlook.
WWD
caioherrero
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Wow, that’s sad
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What an absolute shame about Porter! I really have enjoyed the magazine since its debut, thought it was modern, ahead of the curve and utterly sophisticated. Yet I cannot deny that standards have slipped and the current Summer 2019 issue with Yara Shahidi feels like a new low.
Two issues a year? My subscription rate had better decrease for a total of two issues of year... not what I signed up for. They should've done away with The Edit and pumped the money into the print edition, ugh.
Two issues a year? My subscription rate had better decrease for a total of two issues of year... not what I signed up for. They should've done away with The Edit and pumped the money into the print edition, ugh.
Xone
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Yeah, it's a shame but if you think closely it makes totally sense. It was a little confusing to have first The Edit, then Porter and then changed it to Porter Edit.i Hope they remake print Porter with more pages, more curated to make it special....
I renewed a week or two prior to the annoucement. Hopefully our subscriptions will be based on total issues instead of year
‘Out’ Magazine Chief Phillip Picardi Threatens to Quit in Battle Over Unpaid Writers
Wonder how much longer the magazine lasts..
Wonder how much longer the magazine lasts..
Benn98
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I'm really not Picardi's biggest fan, but he's doing a better job at the magazine than whoever was in charge before him. The design is slick and modern, and the content actually well-written.
I'll also understand the stand he's making right here. As EIC, he's sort of directly responsible for freelancers and the American publishing sector is so small nowadays that his reputation will be tarnished too.
I don't know why OUT, as well as Attitude and Gay Times, don't sell their ad pages to fashion brands. That will be a quicker way to make money. It's a no-brainer really. They have the staff resources, put them to use (seriously, the Out fashion team styles 2 stories a month??.) Most readers will have the same if not higher disposable income than the Esquire or Harper's reader. Gucci does appear in the current issue of OUT (of course it will be money-hungry Gucci, lol), and Tiffany & Co got the back cover, but the rest are all Pharmaceutical companies selling PrEP, as if that's all we think about 24/7.
The flip side of course will mean those fashion brands will start interfering with the editorial content as they're currently doing with women's and men's magazines. And that's fine too, because it's not as if these gay magazines have such a unique point of view. Their content is similar to what we find in a Wonderland or the like. And in fact, just last month we've seen Ruth Bell in Dior Beauty by Peter Phillips, which was obviously a paid effort. May as well go at this paid partnership thing full throttle.
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Benn98
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He shouldn't though. For starters, there wasn't really space for him at CN. And this position provided him with a larger platform than TeenVogue. Money issues aside. I mean, if it's a toss-up between being the EIC of a digital/quarterly TeenVogue, or OUT, then OUT wins.
dodencebt
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It's such a shame what's happening with Out, I finally started reading it again under Phillip's direction. And I agree with Benn, selling out fashion related pages and upping that content in general would probably serve the magazine well and provide a steadier stream of income. I really hope the magazine doesn't go down, it's the only one right now that focuses on all LGBTQ+ issues equally, as opposed to shoving down buff naked men down our throats.
