7/31/2006
marie claire & fashion magazine rebranding
I have a bit of a fashion magazine habit. I tend to, over a month’s time, pick up most of the fashion magazines at the the grocery store when I go in for my weekly trip and I read them over lunch each Saturday. But I only subscribe to one, and that’s Marie Claire.
Marie Claire was the magazine I subscribed to in college, and I grabbed it then because of the fact that they tended to have a few articles in every issue that dealt with more weighty topics - malnutrition in subsaharan Africa, forced prostitution in Pakistan, homelessness in the United States. It had the requisite fashion spreads, but they were interspersed with affordable alternatives, something that’s frankly missing in most fashion magazines, most notably Vogue and Elle. When I subscribed to it again this past May, it read pretty much the same way it had six years ago when I last read it. Nothing much had changed.
The August issue, which I got just this past weekend, is the first headed by new editor-in-chief Joanna Coles [NYT, reg. req.] September will be the first issue completely under her editorial control, but I already noticed some slight changes. It was less bubbly, and somehow the fashion spreads felt like something out of Harper’s Bazaar. I think it was how the photographs were shot. The September cover, featuring Maggie Gyllenhaal, has the same sort of arty feel that Vogue covers sometimes affect.
Joanna Coles mentions in her interview with the NYT that fashion magazines had gotten infected with some of the style of the celebrity weeklies, and that’s definitely the case. I hope Marie Claire can manage to steer away from that.
I was going to make a vague attempt to compare publishing rebranding to library rebranding, but unfortunately my lunch hour is over, and I must actually go back to work, so you’re spared. 
Filed under: Miscellany, Whimsy
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