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for consumers of style
Men's rag trade title gets a glossy makeover
By Jeff Bercovici
Broadly speaking, magazines fall into two categories: consumer titles and other. Other stands for trade magazines, and if they tend to be ignored by media people, it's little wonder.
They tend to be highly targeted, which makes them of some interest to a few readers and a snooze for the vast remaining majority of the reading public.
And those are the good ones. Trades also have a tradition that places insider news and a palsmanship with advertisers over solid reporting and coherent writing, as well as any pretense of design.
Or so it was for a long time. But that's changing, and for a variety of reasons.
As consumer magazines seek out ever-narrower niches to exploit, and as a profusion of web sites continues to siphon readership away from print, trade titles are getting savvy to the ways of their newsstand brethren.
Some are doing quite handsomely at it.
The latest evidence of this is the makeover of DNR. Originally known as the Daily News Record, DNR has been around for 109 years, making it the oldest title in Fairchild Publications’ stable.
Beginning today, DNR subscribers will receive a drastically different magazine. As part of a frequency shift from three times a week to weekly, the title, which covers the menswear industry, has been redesigned with a sleeker, glossier look and a more reader-friendly feel.
It’s the latest example of Fairchild CEO Mary Berner’s strategy of blurring the boundaries between trade and consumer magazines.
"DNR is essentially a business publication, but our readers are also consumers," says editor in chief John Birmingham, who joined Fairchild earlier this year to oversee the relaunch.
"They pick up Vanity Fair, GQ, a lot of great-looking magazines. That raises the bar."
Birmingham, who spent four years at DNR in the '80s as an associate features editor, says the redesign is the culmination of a process that began over a decade ago.
"Over the past 10 to 15 years, DNR has been evolving from a newspaper into a magazine. We’re completing that evolution."
The change to a weekly frequency has been inevitable ever since DNR adopted its Monday-Wednesday-Friday publication schedule in the early '90s, he says.
"That was kind of a half measure. I’m not aware of any publication that comes out three times a week, and I think there’s a reason for that."
Beyond higher-quality paper and other upgrades in production values, the organization of the magazine has been reworked to give it more of a magazine feel.
Birmingham calls the design more "scannable," explaining that readers can now flip through the different sections to decide what they want to read rather than slogging through pages of ill-differentiated text.
Regular sections will include a financial page, a product page called "What’s Selling," a party page called "Social Studies" and a spotlight on new collections called "Out to Launch." Another new department, "Style Council," will feature a panel of three experts—a designer, a retailer and a celebrity—critiquing various examples of "street fashion."
Feature articles in the weekly DNR will be both more analytical and more deeply reported, while fashion photography, under new creative director Tom Beebe, will be "a little more creative, more international," says Birmingham.
The cover of Monday’s issue, a three-part gatefold, features top buyers from a variety of high-end stores sporting hip looks.
Earlier this year, Fairchild launched Beauty Biz, a monthly spinoff of Women’s Wear Daily focusing on the cosmetics and fragrance industries. That title was unique in that it was intended for both beauty professionals and "beauty junkies" with no ties to the industry.
The revamped DNR won’t employ such a dual-audience approach, says Birmingham. However, the title has a spinoff of its own, Menswear, which is intended for a consumer readership.
Birmingham calls it "a pure fashion magazine for the true fashionista." The first semi-annual issue, published in December, went out to 20,000 people culled from subscriber lists of Fairchild and Condé Nast publications, as well as to select retailers.
The next issue will be poly-bagged with issues of women’s fashion magazine W.
Women’s Wear Daily also has a twice-yearly consumer offshoot, WWD: The Magazine, which launched last year.
If Fairchild decides to float Menswear as a standalone title, it will have plenty of competition. Maxim and FHM both launched glossy fashion spinoffs this spring.
Maxim Fashion and FHM Collections will both return in September with fall fashion preview issues.
May 14, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
- Jeff Bercovici is the senior editor for new media.
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