Forbes announced their picks for Most Powerful Fashion Editor, and it's not you-know-who. Cindy Lieves, EIC of Glamour (no relation) gets the crown and the sash, with Wintour tying for number two with Elle's Robbie Myers. Conspicuous by her absence in the top tier is Kim France, much mocked EIC of love-it-or-hate-it Lucky. Slideshow here.
Glamour has a paid circulation of 2.4 million, but the web traffic has jumped over 100%, to 862,708 monthly, in the past year. That's not a huge number, but it's way ahead of the competition. Style.com, Conde's Nast's nod to the web, dropped by 23%. Fashion books don't get the web, as Lauren Sherman explained:
Founding editor Kim France's Lucky, the magazine about shopping that launched with strong buzz in December 2000, has seen a 7.8% decrease in ad revenue for the first half of 2008, while its circulation numbers have remained virtually flat. Granted, the Web site saw a 40% increase from the previous year--but that only came to 145,448 unique users for 2008--a paltry number compared to the online visitors of other magazines that made our list.
DG hopes and prays we do better than 145,000 uniques by this time next year.
Vogue is aspirational, Glamour attainable, but where's the art? Where's the fantasy, the inspiration and the drama? WHERE'S THE...GLAMOUR?
This is a subject that deserves a longer post, and readers--what do you think? What do you want from a fashion magazine? Send us your thoughts or comment below.
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