Here’s yet another shakeup to add to the latest round of editorial musical chairs: Joanna Coles, who has been the editor at Marie Claire since 2006, has just been named editor in chief at Cosmopolitan.
Change must be in the air–and we’re not just talking the seasons. While summer is indeed coming to a close–so too are the tenures of several fashion glossy editors. From T‘s Sally Singer, to Teen Vogue‘s Eva Chen, the editorial world has recently been rocked with several big-name shake-ups at a number of major titles. Read more →
We were all caught off guard by this week’s announcement that Sally Singer would be leaving T, the magazine she left Vogue to helm just two years ago. Her ousting is rumored to be due to a decrease in ad pages, particularly from luxury brands, even though we really loved the hyper-real messy/sexy/edgy vibe she Read more →
Nothing like a little pre-fashion month editor shakeup to stir things up. This afternoon WWD is reporting that Sally Singer, who’s helmed T: The New York Times’ Style Magazine for a little less than two years, is out as the editor. WWD got its hands on a note that Jill Abramson, the EIC of the Read more →
Glamour may have gotten Victoria Beckham to guest edit its September issue, but it got someone even bigger for an upcoming one: The President of the United States. We’ll admit that when we heard the women’s glossy had snagged an interview with an Obama, we were surprised to learn it wasn’t Michelle. The POTUS met Read more →
It’s safe to say the magazine industry has had some ups and downs this year, as we reported yesterday, with more downs than publishers like Conde Nast and Hearst would probably like. Today, WWD took a closer look at what specifically may have contributed to those ups and downs for glossies like Vogue and Allure, Read more →
While print publishing’s had a tough time in the states and in many parts of the world over the past few years, the magazine industry in China is apparently booming. As we already know, China has become a huge market for luxury fashion, but not everyone is just buying the clothes. According to a piece in the Times this past weekend, young Chinese women are spending huge chunks of their incomes on Chinese versions of Western fashion glossies such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, etc. They’re obsessed. And Western publishing houses like Hearst are making bank.
Fashion labels are putting even more money into advertising in China than in the states and these glossies practically have more ad pages than they know what to do with. Both Cosmopolitan and Elle have to publish twice monthly over there because one would be too thick to print and Vogue added four extra issues per year. So, is this it? Is China the antidote to print’s decline here in the west?
The thing is, these publishers’ ability to make money has little to do with their publications’ quality or popularity.
In a world where models are getting their limbs cut off left-right-and-center, and magazines are using photoshop to frankenstein their celeb covers, it’s no secret that a lot of retouching goes on these days. All you need to do is open any magazine–or look at any beauty ad–for proof. But how much retouching actually gets Read more →
The sometimes-drug-addled but always-entertaining Cat Marnell has left her position at xoJane as its Beauty and Health Editor. The news comes after several months of will-she-or-won’t-she, when Marnell was put on disability, and then strongly encouraged to go to rehab. Upon her return from treatment, Marnell wrote this post, titled “I’M BACK; I’M HAPPY; I’M NOT QUITTING MY JOB OR ANYTHING ELSE,” and many of her readers and friends (including Jane Pratt) had hopes that she would get clean. Sadly, that didn’t happen.
Pratt writes on xoJane that she and Cat “both agreed she wasn’t doing her job,” and that’s hard to argue with when Marnell says things like this, to Page Six:
“I’m always on drugs. Look, I couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night when I could be on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust with my friends and writing a book, which is what I’m doing next.”
There’s no question that, over the past ten years, fashion media (and all media for that matter) has changed dramatically–a fact that was underscored last week when bloggers Scott Schuman and Garance Dore took home the CFDA Media Award, something that would have previously been unthinkable.
“10 years ago, [Scott and Garance] wouldn’t have gotten this award,” Pharrel said during the ceremony. “That’s what’s so exciting about tonight.”
Garance reiterated that fact, saying, “Six years ago I opened my blog [and] it wasn’t taken very seriously.” Fast forward to 2012, and she’s accepting the highest honor from her peers. Clearly, the landscape has changed drastically.
“It is just a different world and different time that we live in,” CFDA president Steven Kolb said, of the pair’s win.
“The reason why Scott and Garance won the Media Award and who they are and what they do, is no different than those who have won before,” he added. “Fashion and media are changing every second because of technology.”
Truer words could not have been spoken. Gone are the days when print publications alone ruled the industry–now news is broken on Twitter, and blogs and websites have become legitimate (and necessary) sources of original reporting. While these changes are generally improvements–particularly for the way we consume media–they also have huge implications for the jobs of those who work in the industry, and not all of them are positive. Now, an editor is not just an editor: She or he must also be a blogger, a Tweeter, an Instagrammer, a street style star and in many cases, a “personality.” And that’s not even mentioning all the DJ gigs, TV appearances and special projects that editors today are racking up.
So, what exactly does it mean to be an editor, in today’s ever-changing, digital climate?
Lately, the fashion industry has seemed like one big ever-revolving glass door–It feels like practically every day a new hire (or fire) is announced.
The latest shakeup involves Elle‘s senior fashion news editor Nick Axelrod, who is leaving the womens mag to join Emily Weiss at Into the Gloss. And, from the sounds of it, we can expect the beauty website to continue making more exciting new hires.
“ITG is growing and we are constantly experimenting, aiming to do something new,” Weiss told us. “I’ve always wanted ITG to be a resource and a destination that inspires readers with beauty stories, and to really give beauty the airtime it deserves–and maybe even turn it on its head a little bit.”
“I think Into The Gloss is one of those sites that perfectly fuses what I love about magazines and what’s so exciting about the web,” Axelrod said. “I started in print and I’ll always love print, but this just felt like the right next step for me. I wanted to do something entrepreneurial and with ITG, the possibilities of what we can do are endless.”
We got a press release this morning from our friend Danica Lo announcing her move from Glamour, where she’d been the mag’s senior online fashion and beauty editor for the past eight months (and before that the founding editor of Racked.com, and before that, a fashion writer with the New York Post), to celeb style site StyleBistro. It’s a site that, we have to admit, we didn’t know too much about, so we got a hold of Danica to fill us in on why she decided to leave Conde Nast for Zimbio and what she plans to do with StyleBistro.
Fashionista: Why did you decide to make the move?
