'I'm Pretty. You're Ugly. Buy This' -- Why Fashion Magazines Are on the Decline

By Vanessa Richmond, The Tyee. Posted July 29, 2009.

Lady mags are in trouble. Usually, the mags gorge on ads for their September issues, often inches thick, and by far the biggest of the year. The fall issues' fat revenues, bursting at the seams, usually carry them through the lean months after Christmas. But plummeting ad sales combined with lower circulation rates mean quite a few won't have enough reserves to make it through the hibernation.

Elle's ad pages for September are down 21 per cent, Harper's Bazaar 25 per cent, Vanity Fair 27 per cent, W, 53 per cent, and Vogue, 36 per cent.

Big surprise. Lady mags are dinosaurs. While many in the industry are pointing bejeweled fingers at the decline of (old) media (of which lady mags are pillars), the recession and corresponding lack of interest in over-consuming, and other corporate hoo-ha, lady mags' decreasing power is much because their former readers just want to sit at a different lunch table now.

And since fashion mags aren't the queens of the hallways anymore, it's no surprise that many of those former queens are trying to give themselves a quick makeover, to show they're not with the drowning clique.

Makeover case in point

Like Liz Jones, a former lady mag editrix who this week tries to distance herself from her old friends. She writes in The Daily Mail about why even though she sat at the helm of one of the biggies, Marie Claire, and, "personally, read Vogue for over three decades as though it were scripture," as one Salon writer quipped, she has since decided to call off the affair.

The former glossy queen says lady mags are "patronizing, fake, and pointless." No kidding. But she says it wasn't always this way. She says the main problem is that with circulation down, magazines have become too reliant on advertisers. So in order to secure precious ad dollars in the competitive environment, they write increasingly sycophantic editorials about (often untested) beauty products and (overpriced, irrelevant) clothing labels, and have therefore lost credibility with their readers.

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Tyee Contributing Editor Vanessa Richmond writes the Schlock and Awe column about popular culture and the media. She is also the former managing editor of the Tyee.

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