When Mandi Norwood came to Conde Nast last summer, expectations were high. 
    It was hoped that Norwood, who earned her fame turning the British Cosmo into a racy must-read, would be able to accomplish what others had failed at: crafting a permanent, winning identity for Mademoiselle.
    The identity she came up with was "The Magazine for Your Me Years," a sexed-up and sassy single girl’s guide to the tumultuous post-college world of dating, drinking and designer duds. 
     After an attention-grabbing (and blush-inducing) first issue, media wags settled in to see how Norwood’s Me Years gimmick would play out.
      Seven months later, it’s safe to say it has been a bomb with readers. Though complete circulation figures for second half 2000 aren’t yet available, newsstand sales and sell-through percentage have reportedly been down sharply since last July.
    Not surprisingly, the cool reception has occasioned soul-searching at Mademoiselle, where the talk is already about adopting a new, more "sophisticated" tone starting this spring.
    That yet another heralded repositioning effort has come and gone without improving Mademoiselle’s fortunes should come as no surprise. 
    It’s a narrative arc that Conde Nast should be quite familiar with by now from the saga of Details, the men’s magazine that was closed and relaunched out of Fairchild last fall after a decade of frustrations at Conde Nast.
    Many of the lessons from the Details' debacle apply only too well to Mademoiselle.
     As in that case, Conde Nast chairman Si Newhouse mistakenly thought that he was getting a quick fix for Mademoiselle’s ills by poaching an editor who’d found acclaim elsewhere. 
   Just as Newhouse counted on Mark Golin to reprise his Maxim success, so he has placed his faith in Norwood, a Brit, to replicate her Cosmo results in the very different American publishing market.
     Similarly, in the cases of both Mademoiselle and Details, it was thought that a generous helping of sex would act as a surefire aphrodisiac for newsstand sales.
     At Details, Golin ran afoul of critics and advertisers in his efforts to chart a course between titillating and vulgar.
     Meanwhile, it was clear from early on that Newhouse, though he envied Maxim’s success, was deeply ambivalent about copying its methods.
     Norwood’s Mademoiselle came out of the gates in a blast of tartishness, with eye-popping cover lines like "6 Guys to Do Before You Say ‘I Do’" and "Live Like a Rich Bitch for $75 or Less." 
     But the theory that salaciousness alone spurs newsstand sales for women’s magazines had already been discredited many times over. In fact, Jane magazine, which seeks to reach more or less the same audience of 20-something women, tried revving up its sex quotient last year but cut back after finding readers didn’t like it.
    Most crucially, Mademoiselle, like Details, has to contend with the law of diminishing returns that says that, unless perfectly executed, every repositioning effort intended to clarify the magazine’s appeal to consumers instead has the opposite effect. 
    After a certain number of facelifts, the likelihood of success dwindles as each succeeding makeover only compounds the identity crisis. Both Details and Mademoiselle have been through half a dozen incarnations in the past decade, while competitors like Maxim and Jane have stayed constant.
   There’s one more parallel worth noting. 
   After half a year’s worth of badly-received issues, Golin started talking about a new, more mature direction for Details. Before he could realize his new vision, however, Newhouse fired him and suspended publication of the title.
     Mandi, take note.

-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.

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