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for obsessed masses
Move over Vogue. This here's Kmart country.
By Jeff Bercovici
Launching a fashion-and-gossip magazine on the newsstand is like showing cleavage at the Academy Awards: It would be a great way of getting attention if everybody else weren't doing it too.
For David Pecker, the answer to this problem is more of everything: appealing to a broader selection of readers with more styles, more celebrities and more issues per month.
That's the strategy behind Style 24-7, American Media's newest title, the first issue of which hits newsstands this week.
The plan calls for American Media to distribute Style 24-7 heavily through mass retailers such as Wal-Mart and Kmart. Pecker, the company’s CEO, has described the title as "more mass-market" than existing fashion books.
Style 24-7 will publish four biweekly issues this year, with a total distribution for each issue of 200,000 copies. If the test goes as hoped, the magazine will go weekly at the start of 2002 with a guaranteed circulation of 600,000.
It's an ambitious bet, hinging, as it does, on the premise that large numbers of women crave exhaustive weekly reports on hairstyles of the rich and famous.
As it is, Us Weekly and People already dedicate increasing amounts of space to beauty and fashion. If that's not enough, there's a wide range of monthly magazines covering the topic, from glossy society books like Vogue and W to more accessible newcomers like InStyle and Lucky.
But Style 24-7 editor Brandusa Niro says that's no reason not to climb onto the runway.
"For women, fashion is a relentless obsession," says Niro. "You can never have enough of it."
Niro is also editor in chief of Fashion Wire Daily, a clothes-and-gossip web site which will produce the content for Style 24-7 under a joint venture with American Media.
A typical editorial meeting for Style 24-7 might consist of a two-hour-long discussion about handbags, much to the exasperation of the magazine’s one male staffer, says Niro.
"The poor guy," she says. "After two hours, he's like, 'Have we not talked enough about handbags?' We can go truly crazy. It's a poetic undertaking."
Moreover, she says, women are more interested in fashion when famous actors are part of the mix.
"We do probably relate to celebrities more than to models. At least celebrities play a role we can relate to," says Niro. "A model is just a super-skinny 15-year-old who walks on a runway, which none of us can relate to."
As evidence of this, the Romanian-born Niro points to the abundance of celebrity-style titles in Europe that she used to read as a young girl.
"Basically, this is something that's created for women who love fashion but who are also realistic about how much they can afford to buy," says Niro.
Product spreads will show apparel items at three different price points ranging from posh to sensible--what Niro calls a "catwalk-to-sidewalk concept."
Another feature will show readers how to emulate a celebrity's style while spending less money, something InStyle also does on a regular basis.
Charter advertisers in Style 24-7 include Bloomingdale's, Movado, Revlon, Nine West and Liz Claiborne, according to publisher Steve Aaron.
"People say you're either upmarket or mass-market, but we feel there's a void for magazines that could be broader or more accessible than current fashion magazines," says Aaron.
September 5, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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