Categories: Fashion, Media, Magazines
Yahoo News – Cheaper Chic Spills Into Wintour’sVogue
“[The] 832-page September issue hitting newsstands this week is the magazine’s biggest ever, with 647 ad pages and weighing around 4 pounds.”
This article notes that shopping titles such as Lucky are much cheaper to produce than Vogue and Harper’s BAZAAR. What it didn’t mention that Lucky is much more honest than other fashion magazines in that women’s magazines are about delivering the audience to its advertisers and Lucky is unabashed about its purpose. Magazines such as Vogue and Marie Claire feature both fashion and social commentary witihin its pages. For example, the September 2004 issue of Vogue had articles about John Kerry’s daughters (photographed in couture gowns) and a former punk rock singer now with the leftist MoveOn.org and a review of a book on India that perpetuates the image of that country as poor, dysfunctional, and corrupt.
This article first brought to my attention SHOP Etc., a new magazine from the Hearst Corporation (which also publishes Harper’s BAZAAR, Cosmo, and Oprah’s O), designed to compete with Lucky. SHOP Etc. uses the metaphor of a store with departments for fashion, home, and beauty and includes bifold pages to demarcate each department. While Lucky has its Lucky Breaks and stickers page, SHOP Etc. has coupon inserts.
Overall, I am not excited about SHOP Etc., because it’s nowhere as visually appealing as Lucky. This magazine will probably go the way of HotDots, another shopping title that tried to integrate a print format and web shopping, which discontinued publication after only a few issues.
Cold Cream 'n' Roses 
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