Category: Magazines

NYT and WSJ recognize benefit of lifestyle coverage

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When I visited my folks in St. Louis in early September, I began each morning reading the Wall Street Journal (IMO the only journal of record in the U.S.) Maybe it was because of New York Fashion Week, but I was surprised by the amount of coverage given to fashion in the WSJ: for example, there were articles on how to wear the new retro styles (tweeds, brooches) without looking dowdy and the importance of patternmakers to fashion designers. The WSJ has greatly increased its lifestyle coverage and plans to launch a weekend edition in Fall 2005 to compete for advertising dollars. Meanwhile, the WSJ has launched a television show The Wall Street Journal Weekend on the Fine Living TV network.

T: The New York Times Style Magazine

The New York Times has revamped its fashion and interior design coverage into a new Sunday magazine simply called T: The New York Times Style Magazine. To learn more about T, read this press release from the New York Times Company.

Yahoo News – Cheaper Chic Spills Into Vogue

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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.

What Guys Want

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I picked up a copy of the premiere issue of CARGO, the men’s version of Lucky magazine.


CARGO

I’ve been a fan of Lucky from the beginning. The main purpose of women’s magazines is to deliver their audiences to the advertisers. Magazines such as Vogue often have a disconnect between articles on social and political issues on one hand and opulent fashion spreads on the other. (Yes, I know that I’m writing this after sending two messages to The Style Page e-group about the terrorist attacks in Madrid – a member from Malaysia unsuscribed that day. Coincidence?) Lucky, I think, is much more honest in that it dispenses with everything except delivering the audience to its advertisers.

But anyway, back to Cargo. Whereas Lucky focuses on fashion, beauty, and lifestyle, Cargo focuses on “Tech” (consumer electronics), Style, Cars, and Culture. “Culture” here is a catchall that encompasses interior decoration and food & drink, as “culture” on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is a catchall that includes etiquette and nice manners. Another difference is that Cargo is much more wordy than Lucky – are guys really more concerned with how things perform, while women are more concerned with how things look, or is that just a myth?

I was rather turned off by the blatant approach to sex in Cargo. There is a short feature on the Trovata clothing design team, whose T-shirts and cargo pants feature “nudie” graphics, another feature on buying roses that says that peach-colored roses mean “Sheer lust, Baby,” and lastly, a feature on what to wear on a third date, as many women say that they’d go to bed with a man by the third date.

I can’t resist bringing up Queer Eye again. The thing that I like about Queer Eye, and what I suspect that many other women like, is that it’s about pleasing the woman in one’s life and romance. Cargo, on the other hand, is more about getting laid.

BTW Cargo’s interior design feature was done by Thom Filicia, Queer Eye’s “Design Doctor,” who just signed a contact to serve as a spokesman for Pier 1.