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.