If you’re anything like us, many fourth-grade afternoons were spent discussing hairstyles seen in Teen magazine, and pretending you were actually going to do all those at-home beauty spa treatments (this is more than a decade before Teen turned into Star-lite) performed by the fresh-faced models you totally thought you were going to look like once you hit junior high.

So we’re a little sad to learn that Hearst is folding Teen (along with Teenmag.com) to “focus” on Teen’s slightly trashier big sister, Seventeen.

Now with CosmoGIRL! also out of the picture, that pretty much leaves Teen Vogue and Seventeen to duke it out for the teen market.

Last week, you might remember that ELLE Accessories kind of folded, along with a few more print magazines, and CosmoGIRL! died just before that.

Now, Time Inc’s announced that they’re cutting 600 jobs from their company, instituting a total restructuring of the management of their titles (which includes In Style, easily the most widely-read fashion women’s magazine on the market) and will now be regularly lending writers between magazines, presumably to save on pay. And Time’s the world’s largest magazine publisher with 130 books on its roster.

For now, they’re saying that none of their titles are folding. Whether anyone should really believe that remains to be seen. But here’s a thought:

Time is widely regarded as one of the best companies to work for. Anyone who’s ever worked at In Style will go on and on about the hours, the pay, the benefits, and especially the general culture of super nice people who are all sans ‘tude.

But what happens when you strip staffers of their sense of security and inevitably make everyone more competitive for their jobs?

Ouch.

What seems like seconds after the demise of CosmoGIRL!, 02138, and Radar (though we’re not sure that last one counts), comes the news that Hachette is “suspending” publication of ELLE Accessories for at least a year, putting a handful of people out of work during that time.

Add to that all the retail lay-offs in WWD this morning, and this almost sounds like a Bloomberg version of the fashion industry.

Beginning of a trend?

If so, we worry for who’s next…