Digital Fashion Media

from the book

“Fashion Journalism”
by Julie Bradford

chapter 3 Fashion media and audiences

Università La Sapienza Roma, AA 2019/2020

 “FASHION IS AN
INDUSTRY THAT HAS
VERY CLEVERLY
CREATED ITS OWN
MEDIA TO SUPPORT IT”
(Caryn Franklin, journalist,
2013)
Maybe the relationship between fashion
media and fashion industry is more subtle
than this, and apply to some media more
than others. Surely it is a lot closer than in
most other journalistic fields. Fashion
was a driver for the spread and popularity
of early magazines and its rhythms, needs
and advertising still sustain the print media
today.
 in the fashion media
are crucial …
the centrality of the brand
the importance of the target
reader
Traditionally fashion journalism is criticized as largely
uncritical and kowtows too much to advertisers.

Why?
 Journalists are a crucial cog in the
fashion wheel, acting as gatekeepers
declaring what is in and what is out,
making new trends sound
desiderabile and explaining a
designer’s ideas to the public.
(Kawamura Y., Fashion-ology, 2005)
One connection to motivate the symbiotic relationship
between media and industry in fashion is frequency -
how magazine publication dates fit round new
collections.

E.G. Biannuals come out twice a year to fit with the

two fashion seasons, AW and SS. The trouble is
people can now see (and sometimes buy) collections
instantly online.
 The system of media changed as the
system of fashion. Fast Fashion
introduced new types of magazines or
the change of the frequency for old ones.

“So we know how important it was to a have a fashion

weekly that could really keep up with the change of pace”

Fiona McIntosh, editor-in-chief of the weekly magazine Grazia

when it was launched in 2005
The fashion system we know now grew up alongside
the development of mass media.

Fashion was always a preoccupation of social

elites, especially at royal courts. By the XVII century
illustrations of the latest dress styles could be
engraved, hand-coloured and reproduced as
fashion plates. As printing improved, these plates
could be gathered into collections and distributed
throughout Europe.
 first fashion magazines:

In France/ Le Mercure Galant (from 1672)

in UK/ Lady’s Magazine or Entertaining

Companion for the Fair Sex (1771)
They spawned many imitators and found
a ready-made audience in the newly
affluent upper middle-classes thrown
up by the Industrial Revolution, in the
latter part of the XVIII century who
were striving for social respectability.
The magazines as providing ‘imaginary communities
for female readers, who had no real way of meeting
other women in groups

(Martin Conboy, historian, 2004:135)

These first magazines also set the pattern of

addressing women in the private world of home,
rather than the public world of work, and of defining
their look as the most important thing about them.
XIX century: huge boom of magazines thanks to new
leisure time, mass literacy, railways to distribute them,
and improvements to color publishing.

between 1870 and 1900 in England: 50 new titles,

many based in London where huge department
stores were opening (Selfriges, Harvey Nichols and
Harrods).

These new women’s magazines were made up 50%

of adv pages. Shopping and Consumption were the
driving forces behind these issues.
 Vogue
It was a social gazette when it first came out in NYC
in 1892. Few famous designers, non catwalk shows,
so fashion coverage consisted of what the rich were
wearing at social events.

In 1909 Vogue was taken over by lawyer Conde

Nast. He set about turning it into one of the first
specialist magazines deliberately targeted at a
wealthy niche audience with the aim of pulling in
high-end advertising.
Vogue didn’t just chronicle the most of the changes in
women’s life in the XX and XXI centuries but it actually
helped propagate them in the early days by showing
women new images of themselves they could identify
with.
 It worked.

Today event the more mainstream glossies and other

consumer magazines secure around 60% of their
revenue form adv (McKay, 2013). It is this reliance
that has led to accusations that their editorial is
compromised.
 Women’s magazines continued to
boom in the early XX century and
reached an all-time high in the late
1950s and 1960s. In the 1960s
teenagers were identified as a
separate market with their own
disposable income and similarly
happened for the male market in the
1980s.
In 1988 was launched GQ, a lifestyle manual for
men. Fashion was represented as unfussy,
classic and timeless to avoid accusations of
triviality, while articles about news, sport and
women kept everything absolutely masculine.
Throughout the 20 and 21 centuries the high cost of
publishing meant the development of large
corporations owning a stable of magazines, with
only a handful of independents.

This is important to understand the hostile climate to

traditional fashion magazines and fashion journalists
that was largely diffused when digital media
exploded and new fresh figures as fashion bloggers
appeared on the market.
Fashion coverage in newspapers was largely a
post-war development but even then it was
largely limited to a weekly slot in the qualities
(McRobbie, 1988).

It was generally in the form of fashion editor’s

report on couture shows, trends and on what to
wear for various social occasions (Polan, 2006).
It began to be taken more serious from the 1960s,
buoyed by the strong trade press, and writers began
to analyse fashion in social and economic context to
appeal to a general reader.

From the 1980s fashion reporting grew yet more

prominent along with other forms of lifestyle
journalism. Fashion stories began to appear on
news pages, stylists were hired to produce shoots for
feature pages and colour supplements become a
natural home for extended coverage.
 Overview on the today’s print market

The British Fashion Council estimates that fashion

magazines employ 3.101 people and contribute 205
minion pounds to the UK economy each year (BFC,
2010).

They can be divided in 3 types: biannuals,

monthlies, weeklies.
The biannual tend to feature high production values,
luxury brands and lavish photo shoots with top
models and photographers, together with wider arts
and culture coverage. They have relatively small
circulations but are read by many influential people in
fashion. They are supported by luxury advertising.
 Weeklies were once associated with traditional
older women’s magazines and downmarket titles,
but 2005 onwards saw a wave of new fashion-and-
celebrity titles for younger women.

It was a very delicate balancing act in the early

days trying to put together the “news & shoes”
that didn’t upset upmarket advertisers.
 Newspapers don’t work with brands as closely as
the glossies.

Newspaper fashion journalists often describe

themselves as freer and more ethical than magazine
journalists.

They write for a general audience that may or may

not be interested in fashion. Explaining fashion and
setting it in its economic, political and social context
are part of how newspapers will make it relevant to
the general reader.
 2013

the orribile black year

for all magazines

 Editors must go where the audience is

By 2013 the audience is online, increasingly

on smartphones and tablets

The problem is making money out of

websites and social media channels. Most
website content is free, so there’s mo money
from sales. And advertising, which provides
the bulk of a magazine’s income, is nothing
like as expensive online as it is in print.
 When magazines and new papers first launched
websites in the late 1990s, it was very much a case
of print product first, and website off the back of that,
either reproducing the print content or acting as a
shopfront.

Now they radically changed.

We had to change our definition of magazines.

“We used to talk about magazines and
websites; now we talk about
brands.It’s not about a product
anymore, it’s about curated, trusted,
quality content, whatever the platform
that’s on”
Loraine Davis, PPA
 Content-sharing sites and fashion blogs sparked a
new interest in street style, which magazines use to
drive traffic to their sites. And magazines and news-
papers are able to reconnect with fashion brands
online with shopable contents.

When a reader clicks on a product in a digital

magazine, or on an app or on a web page and gets
redirected to an online store to make a purchase, the
publication gets a sum of money in what’s called
affiliate marketing.
 As for websites, publication approach them in
different ways. Some have a separate web team;
some have writers working across platforms.

News and features from the print edition are often

published online too, but perhaps with added video
or photo gallery.
 Tablet editions

At one point tablets were being hailed as the saviour

of magazines, as publishers saw at last how they
could charge money for digital versions of their print
products.

These tablet versions give readers something extra:

to shop, share and save.

The tablet versions didn’t gained enough success.

Why? The Business of Fashion speculated that the
publisher didn’t differentiate them and so they remain
“paper for the screen”.
 The importance of brand

Your content is appearing across so many

touchpoints, you must have a clear idea of what
your brand is so you can be consistent.

A brand is literally a company name, but in

publishing it’s more what the brand stands for that
counts - what identity or image it has, what positive
values it connotes, its tone of voice and its
relationship with its audience. As a voice of authority
in a certain industry, trade magazines are in an even
better position to extend their brand.
 “So as print declines, the
successful brands will make sure
that every-thing else will grow. It’s
not just words, it’s events, it’s
thinking of ways to keep
consumers consuming you”
(Victoria White, editor of Company)
 The importance of audience

The audience shapes everything a newspaper or

magazine does, and a fashion journalist should have a
clear vision of whom they’re addressing, how they’re
addressing them and what they want.

This is not just so the writing hits the right tone, and
the fashion is at the right price point and style, but also
so advertisers will come on board knowing their
message will be getting to the right people.

That’s why publications will put out media kits or

packs summing up who the reader is and what their
habits are. Speak to any fashion journalist and he or she
knows who they’re writing for and why.
 So audience needs will affect:

what kind of coverage fashion gets

how useful or inspirational it is

what kind of style icons are featured

how expensive the clothes are

where items can be bought

when content will drop

All to fit round the audience’s perceived lifestyle.

 It works the other way round, as well.

Designers and retailers might refuse to work with a

certain newspaper or magazine because its
audience doesn’t match their market or image, and
they want to protect the brand.

Before a publication laches, therefore, it has to have

identified a ready and willing market whose needs
are not currently being met and that advertisers
want to reach.
UNDER PRESSURE
Someone like the executive fashion editor or director
or market editor on a glossy will have the specific role
of tallying up how many editorial mentions its
advertisers had, and ensuring that they’re in line
with how much that advertiser spends with the
magazine.

The obvious downside of this is that some products

in a magazine are selected because there form
advertisers, not necessarily because they’re the
best out there. And non-advertisers - including young
or even mid-range designers, who don’t have the
budget to spend on advertising - will have difficulty
getting mentioned and noticed.
 This is exacerbated by the fact that a disgruntled
designer or brand can also stop sending you tickets
for their runways, restrict access to their samples and
refuse interviews if you upset them with an untoward
comment.
 Publications working with brands

advertising

sponsor a fashion shoot in a magazine

fund a fashion journalist’s trip to Paris F.W. (e.g.)

advertorial : a feature that looks like the magazine’s normal

editorial and is designed as such, but that is sponsored by a
brand and normally has a tab “advertorial”, “special feature” or
“promotion” at the top of the page

celebrity interviews: some are arranged by a brand’s PR to

publicize a fashion or beauty line that the actress has a contract
with (e.g.). The product normally get a guaranteed mention in a
credit box at the bottom of the interview, a often a couple of
mention stitched into the piece itself.
 on celebrity interviews

“It’s tricky, because you get a maximum of 20

minutes with the celebrity, the PR asks for your
questions beforehand and you have to fight to
insert a question about something other on the
brand”

Louise Gannon, celebrity interviewer (2013)

 on working with brands

“The twin pressures of copy sales and maintaining

a premium environment for advertisers is the single
biggest struggle because they don’t complement
each other at all. How far you can push a story or a
red line? My journalism side wants to do that, but I
have to check it against whether it’s going to offend
important advertisers”.

Fiona McIntosh, former editor of Elle and Grazia

 The simplest response to
accusation that glossies are too
close to advertisers is that they
would not survive without the
cash.
 “So although there is this feeling
sometimes that creatively it’s not pure,
well - magazines are a business, you’re
not sitting there writing poetry”
(Alexandra Shulman, Vogue editor)
 Carine Roitfeld, former editor of French Vogue
describes the relationship between magazines and
advertisers as a “mutual understanding”,
underlining that there is more give and take than
critics suppose. Advertisers need a cool, forward-
looking environment to appear in, so it’s in their best
interests that a magazine retains that.
 Digital media and recession caused the rise of
investment on Internet advertising and less on
print. Another headache for magazines or
newspapers is that online adv is measurable;
retailers know exactly how many people click on
their links, make a purchase, play their videos or
read their emails.

Most magazines and some newspapers had

already introduced click-and-buy, where the
reader can click on or scan a product and be taken
straight through to the retailer’s website to buy it,
earning commission for the publisher.
 This blending of editorial content and advertising/
sponsorship is disturbing for some print journalist and
editors who believe in a “church and state”
separation between the two.

But the digital colleagues say they have to get over

their distaste, arguing that is more transparent than
the traditional business model where advertisers
had more of a say than readers were ever aware of.
 “This is the publishing model of the
future: a blend of content and
commerce talking in realtime to a
hightly-engaged audience with a finger
primed to purchase”.
(Jeremy Langmead, editor-in-chief Mr Porter)
 So what the future hold? Will
magazines and newspapers still be
around in 50, 20 or even 10 years’
time, and how will they be paid for?
 Some believe that the luxury appeal of a glossy
magazine will never die out, even though they may
become a niche product rather than a mass-market
product. Others on the contrary that they has
already lost their battle.
“Never assume that the thing that is
there at the moment is the way it will
always be”

(Charlie Porter, journalist Financial Times)

 Fashion itself is about change, so you
have to be able to embrace change. You
have to be able to get excited by the idea
of change and want to see what the
effect of change is, no matter what it is
- even if it’s your magazine closing and
the industry changing.

If you’re going to get scared and timid

and pretend the world is the way it was,
then you’re not writing about fashion.