The Business of Magazines

[honeycombchild]

It's incredible how much effect Jennifer Aniston has on sales, despite the fact she appears on so many covers, and gives pretty much the same interview each time.

 

[Miss Dalloway]

So happy for W, and i have long quit trying to understand how JA sells so much, but she has a huge following of women who adore her, so she will always sell for magazines, no matter how boring the rest of us think she is. I wonder if US Vogue regrets pulling that quote stunt on the cover the last time she graced it. If its true that her PR went ballistic and told Wintour to never ever approach them again.

Thanks so much for posting that Gary.

 

[Melancholybaby]

Jesus Christ, 770.000 copies? The woman can sell magazines like warm bread (inexplicably).

Great to hear W had a big boost in sales. I imagine that it was the fashion fans that led to an increase in sales for that particular issue.

 

[Srdjan]

Go Jen!

 

[mrsjamesdean]

Vogue editor sacked as heads roll at News Magazines

The Australian fashion industry is in shock following the sudden exit of Vogue Australia editor-in-chief Kirstie Clements after 10 years as editor-in-chief of the magazine.
The chief executive of NewsLifeMedia, Nicole Sheffield, today announced that Edwina McCann had been appointed editor-in-chief.

SMH

Would explain why the last couple of issues have been quite good, anyways I'm excited to see what McCann would bring to Vogue!

 

[AL92]

^I'm so sad though! After 10 years and bringing VA out of the financial issues brought on by Marion Hume (EIC before Kirstie) and all the contribution she has brought to the Aus fashion industry I'm so sad to see her go!

ps why do you think Kirstie leaving would have made the issues good?

 

[Miss Dalloway]

^ I always thought she has zero taste, and lacks the eye for making interesting images, just my observation based on the issues i have bought, and there have been plenty. I do however agree that it has been getting better which makes her firing ironic. But i will shed no tears because i remember all those awful issues without a single thing in it worthy of my time. And i am excited to see what McCann brings to the table.

 

[AL92]

^ I always thought she has zero taste, and lacks the eye for making interesting images, just my observation based on the issues i have bought, and there have been plenty. I do however agree that it has been getting better which makes her firing ironic. But i will shed no tears because i remember all those awful issues without a single thing in it worthy of my time. And i am excited to see what McCann brings to the table.

Yeah I understand your point. VA did have some horrid years. I wonder if Christine will defect to Vogue?!

 

[mrsjamesdean]

^^ Same opinion here. I brought Vogue Aus purely because it was readily available if I was overseas I would not be prompted to buy it. While she of course had good issues here and there, my issue was she was very inconsistent in Vogue. You can't just put all your effort into the importants 2 months then leave the remaining 10 lacking.

 

[Cicciolina]

Yeah I understand your point. VA did have some horrid years. I wonder if Christine will defect to Vogue?!

I don't understand why everyone is so quick to assume that Christine will defect to Vogue. How about Jillian Davison? She's a pretty legendary stylist, and so much better than Naomi Smith.

 

[AL92]

I don't understand why everyone is so quick to assume that Christine will defect to Vogue. How about Jillian Davison? She's a pretty legendary stylist, and so much better than Naomi Smith.

Only because if Naomi remains at Vogue as fashion director, the same position Jillian Davison has how at HB..well whats the point?

 

[YourMonster]

Oh no!

This news saddens me. I Personally dislike Edwina McCann and what she has done with Harper's Bazaar. I don't think she brought anything new to the magazine. If anything I think Alison Veness-McGourty would have been first choice for the Job. She did an incredible job as Editor of Harper's Bazaar and then Grazia and then she disappeared. But I'm assuming she's taking part in the Re-Launch of Elle, here in Australia. Only time will tell I guess. But still I loved Kirstie and what she did for the magazine, her support for Australian designers goes beyond anything that Harper's Bazaar has done. It's a shame.

 

[Cicciolina]

Only because if Naomi remains at Vogue as fashion director, the same position Jillian Davison has how at HB..well whats the point?

The same could be same for Christine. Vogue already have Ilona Hamer.
I just feel like people assume she's taking Christine because she's a bigger 'street style name'.

 

[AL92]

The same could be same for Christine. Vogue already have Ilona Hamer.
I just feel like people assume she's taking Christine because she's a bigger 'street style name'.

I think Christine (if she defects) would take Meg Gray's role as fashion editor as Meg recently left. I believe Ilona is only a junior fashion editor.

 

[MissMagAddict]

Edward Enninful - An Image Maker Who Gets The Picture

The New York Times
May 16, 2012
by Jacob Bernstein

EDWARD ENNINFUL has a thing he likes to say on photo shoots: “I want her to look rich, rich, rich and chic, chic, chic.”

That’s certainly what he went for with Viola Davis in the February issue of W Magazine, where Mr. Enninful is the fashion and style director. At the time, Ms. Davis was up for an Oscar, playing a drab-looking maid in “The Help,” so Mr. Enninful decked her out in sexy Dolce & Gabbana and a diamond necklace from Camilla Dietz Bergeron.

But sometimes he plays against type. Kate Moss, for instance, has had enough tabloid scrapes to rival Paris Hilton, so Mr. Enninful cast her as a nun in a spread shot by Steven Klein. And for the magazine’s November art issue, Mr. Enninful collaborated with Steven Meisel on a series of fake ads that ran throughout the magazine, including one that featured a contestant from “RuPaul’s Drag Race” named Carmen Carrera hawking a fictitious fragrance called La Femme.

It generated considerable attention (“Isn’t W Magazine the cleverest in all the land?” the fashion blog Styleite wrote) and helped to cement Mr. Enninful’s ascent as one of the industry’s most influential image makers. He’s also among the few who is black.

“I like to play with contrast,” said Mr. Enninful, 40. “It’s about changing people’s perceptions of people.”

That’s an editorial luxury granted by his new perch, for which he left Vogue in April of last year. With a circulation of about 450,000 people, W has historically been more of an objet than magazine, making it possible to publish riskier photography. But by 2010, amid a brutal recession and competition from V and Interview, the future was looking bleak.

Condé Nast, which owns W, suddenly replaced its longtime editorial director, Patrick McCarthy, with Stefano Tonchi, who had previously been the editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Still, ad pages showed little sign of rebounding.

Mr. Tonchi tapped Mr. Enninful to bring more visual excitement to magazine. “Very often you meet with stylists, they just think in terms of fashion shoots,” Mr. Tonchi said. “Edward thinks about what a magazine as a whole is about.”

In short order, W began showing signs of life. The magazine’s ad pages are up 16.7 percent this year through May, with 453 pages compared to 388 pages for the same period last year, according to Media Industry Newsletter. It was the biggest year-over-year gain among fashion titles.

Many give Mr. Enninful a fair share of the credit. “He is a big part of that success,” Mr. Tonchi said.

“He’s made it much more relevant,” said Ronnie Cooke Newhouse, a prominent advertising executive who has worked with Mr. Enninful on campaigns for Calvin Klein and Lanvin. (Ms. Newhouse is also the wife of Jonathan Newhouse, chairman of Condé Nast International.)

Among other things, Mr. Enninful conceptualized quirky, narrative-driven photography features that played off celebrities’ public personas. In November, the magazine put Nicki Minaj on the cover, dolled up as an 18th-century French courtesan. In April, it took Jessica Biel, the ultimate girl next door, and recreated her as a Raquel-Welch-like bombshell.

“Models are malleable creatures, but it’s a whole other ballgame with celebrities,” said Lynn Hirschberg, the magazine’s editor at large. “Edward brings something out in them that makes them not just people that are interesting for fashion, but more interesting versions of themselves.”

Mr. Enninful’s ability to handle the fragile egos of movie stars and to be edgy without alienating advertisers may have something to do with the time he spent in front of the camera himself.

In the late 1980s, while riding the London subway, the 16-year-old Mr. Enninful was spotted by the British stylist Simon Foxton, who scouted him to be a fashion model. Mr. Enninful’s mother, Grace, a seamstress from Ghana, was horrified at first, but relented. Over the next two years, Mr. Enninful shot editorials with the photographer Nick Knight and did music videos with Neneh Cherry.

But he realized he was never going to be a supermodel. At 18, he got a job as a fashion editor at i-D and became a fixture on London’s night-life scene. “The whole acid house scene was starting,” Mr. Enninful recalled. “We’d go down Portobello market and buy our clothes and customize them and try and outdo the next person.”

By 30, he was styling big campaigns and collaborating with Mr. Meisel at Italian Vogue. “Before that, I was a stylist. With Steven I became an editor,” Mr. Enninful said. “He taught me that fashion photographs could comment on things that were going on.”

One shoot Mr. Enninful and Mr. Meisel did was a spoof of the “They’re Just Like Us,” pages of Us Weekly. Another featured Linda Evangelista decked out in Chanel, her face wrapped in bandages, as if she’d just had plastic surgery.

“Edward understands immediately what the concept of a story is,” said Franca Sozzani, the editor of Italian Vogue. “He’s committed to ideas.”

In 2005, Mr. Enninful got a call from Grace Coddington, asking him to become a contributing editor at American Vogue. Working at Vogue wasn’t always easy. “Did you see ‘The September Issue?’ My story was in the bin,” Mr. Enninful said, referring to a scene in the documentary film where Anna Wintour summarily rejects an editorial he had styled.

“I learned that fashion was about more than fancy images,” Mr. Enninful said. “That there was a business side as well.”

source: nytimes.com

 

[honeycombchild]

Alexandra Shulman admitted last night that, even with 20 years' experience editing British Vogue, she doesn't always know what makes a best-selling cover girl.
"Music stars haven't sold at all well," Shulman said at the ToMax talk Fashion and Fantasy: What's in Vogue and Why Does It Matter? in London last night. " Adele is the most popular woman in the world, but one of the worst sellers we've ever had. I find there has to be a relationship with the person on the cover that goes beyond how they look. Our most successful cover was the millennium issue - which didn't have anyone on it, but acted like a mirror so you could see your own reflection!" She also admitted that there is one person she would like to put on the cover who is proving elusive: "I'd love to have Kate Middleton on the cover," she smiled. "I assure you it is not for want of asking!"

Sharing a platform with fashion designers Jas MB and Tessa Edwards, Shulman went on to express her continued frustration with the problem of small sample sizes.
"I've written another letter to a designer this week because the sample sizes are too small," she said. "All magazines use the same samples so if they are small it limits the choice of models that can be put in them. You are then by necessity showing a very small range of body types. There's a limit to what I can do about it myself. We try by never using models who are under 16, and not using models with eating disorders. As part of the Health Initiative that Vogue has just launched, I am meeting all the top UK model agents in a couple of weeks to discuss what we can do in this country. However, other parts of the press need to take responsibility and change their ways too. Tabloids and weekly magazines that ring cellulite and promote diets are a part of the problem."
Shulman believes that there is also a lack of choice for young people in role models to aspire to, and would like to use the magazine as a vehicle to change that.
"Young girls look up to Cheryl Cole or Cat Deeley and that is a pretty narrow prescription of existence," she said. "We want to show glamorous women in other industries, it doesn't always have to be dour women doing cerebral activities. It is possible to use your brain and want to wear Jimmy Choos and have great eyelashes. In this country there is an attitude ,or a snobbery, that suggests that women can't do both, which I would like to see change."

Vogue.co.uk


Adele sold well for US Vogue I believe? If British Vogue had shot Adele like the US edition did, I'm sure it would have sold much better.

 

[Miss Dalloway]

Wow that is surprising, didnt they have on their site how she was their best seller? I know i read it somewhere...... but i defo trust it more from Shulmans mouth, and it shocks me she was their worst seller they ever had, wow.

She actually didnt sell that well for US Vogue either, while it wasnt as bad as UK, it was off 2.5 percent from the previous year.

Thanks for posting that.

 

[blueorchid]

Wow that is surprising, didnt they have on their site how she was their best seller? I know i read it somewhere...... but i defo trust it more from Shulmans mouth, and it shocks me she was their worst seller they ever had, wow.

I remember reading that too! I think it was even posted on here.

Edit: I did a quick search and found the article that quote came from. It's funny though, in the Google Cache of that article the full quote is: "The musician has been one of the magazine's most popular (and best-selling), cover girls yet, with an unprecedented number of user comments flooding in showing their appreciation." They removed the "best-selling" part. Interesting.

 

[honeycombchild]

I remember at the time being told it had sold well also, and I'm even sure there was talk of it going back to print to refill newsstands. Clearly not..

Very odd. I really would imagine she was someone who would translate into big sales, I can't think of anyone I know who's averse to her.

 

[Miss Dalloway]

I remember reading that too! I think it was even posted on here.

Edit: I did a quick search and found the article that quote came from. It's funny though, in the Google Cache of that article the full quote is: "The musician has been one of the magazine's most popular (and best-selling), cover girls yet, with an unprecedented number of user comments flooding in showing their appreciation." They removed the "best-selling" part. Interesting.

Thanks for finding, and posting that, they got caught haha.

But ya i don't know anyone who would dislike or hate Adele either, but i guess the people that adore her, and her music aren't necessarily the ones who are interested in seeing her on the cover of Vogue. Still surprised it would do so poorly.