Why we still read fashion magazines
A feed never ends. A magazine has a last page, and that may be why we still love it.
Every few years, someone announces the death of the fashion magazine. Sales are down, advertising has moved online and a phone gives us more images in a minute than a magazine gives in a month. And yet, we still buy them. We asked ourselves why, and the answer says something about how we want to see the world.
A magazine is edited
The internet has everything. A magazine has a point of view. An editor and a small team look at a thousand things and choose forty. They put them in an order, give them space and say: this is what matters now.
That act of choosing is the value. When you open a good magazine, you put yourself in the hands of someone with taste, for an hour. You may not agree with every page, but you see the world through a clear pair of eyes.
The photograph needs paper
A fashion photograph on a phone is eight centimetres wide. You look at it for one second and move your thumb. The same photograph across two pages of a magazine is fifty centimetres wide. You see the cloth, the light, the expression. You stay.
A screen shows you a picture. Paper lets you live with it.
Hana Sato
The great fashion images of the last century were made for the page. The photographers knew where the fold would be and how the ink would sit on the paper. Much of what we call style was taught to us by those pages.
It ends
This may be the most important reason. A magazine has a last page. When you reach it, you are finished. You close it and do something else.
A feed does not end. It is built to keep you there, and it leaves you a little empty. People who have gone back to print often say the same thing: it is restful. There is a beginning, a middle and an end, as in a meal.
The new magazines
The magazines that are doing well today are not the ones you remember. They are smaller, thicker and more expensive. They come out twice or four times a year. They are printed on heavy paper and kept on a shelf, like books.
Their readers are young. In a survey of independent magazine shops in six European cities, more than half of the buyers were under thirty-five. For a generation that grew up on screens, print is not old. It is special.
What print does badly
Let us be fair. A magazine is slow. It cannot tell you what happened at a show this morning. It is expensive to make and to send. It uses paper and ink, although the best publishers now print on recycled stock with plant-based inks.
And many magazines are simply not good. Too many pages are advertisements that look like articles. Too many covers show the same ten famous faces. The magazines that have closed were often the ones that stopped giving readers a reason to pay.
Where that leaves us
We think there is room for both, if each does what it does best. Online is for news, for speed and for conversation. Print is for depth, for beauty and for memory.
This journal is online, because we want everyone to be able to read it. But we make it as a magazine is made. We publish less. We edit hard. We give the pictures space. And we hope that you read each story to the end and then close the window.
How to read a magazine
It sounds strange to give instructions, but many of us have lost the habit.
- Put your phone in another room
- Start at the front and turn every page
- Read one long story completely
- Tear out a page you love and keep it
That last step is one that no screen can offer. A wall or a notebook of pages you have kept over the years is a portrait of your own taste, and it is more honest than any folder of saved posts.
Are fashion magazines still relevant to what people wear?
Is print bad for the environment?
A last thought
Fashion is about looking closely. A magazine asks you to slow down and look. For as long as there are people who want to do that, there will be someone to print the pages.