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By Newsweek Editors
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A fashion magazine is a wish book, a jewel box of ideas, a guide to ease women through fierce trajectories of changing allure. Editing one takes nerve. As Cecil Beaton, archdeacon of the soigne, once put it, "Those who work in fashion's sphere must expect the worst and should provide for an early demise." Especially right now. With September's plump issues of Vogue, Elle, Harper's Bazaar and Mirabella on the newsstands, Regis Pagniez of the flagging Elle published a little note in some New York dailies. It read: "Dear Anna, Grace and Liz, Seven years ago Elle woke up the slumbering fashion magazines of America. The fashion action is heating up. This is going to be fun. Love, Regis." Quel guy. Between the lines, Anna Wintour, the Ice Princess of Vogue, sunny Elizabeth Tilberis of the resurrected Harper's Bazaar and amazing Grace Mirabella, survivor extraordinaire, could read a declaration of war. Around the rag mags, behind every kiss kiss and YOU are FABOO!, it's bang bang-you're dead.
The field of battle now extends from the perfume souk on the ground floor of Saks to the cutting rooms of Seventh Avenue to the runways of Paris, London and Milan. From a power office overlooking the Hudson and Central Park, the amiable Tilberis likes what she sees. In her last perch as editor of British Vogue, she tracked the way Elle rode the '80s, pressing for younger styles and readers. She watched the panic of Conde Nast's S. I. Newhouse, the world's worst-dressed billionaire, who fired Mirabella and acquired Wintour to make Vogue young. She studied Rupert Murdoch, who staked Mirabella to her intelligent-if adthin-magazine. And she said yes to Randolph Hearst, tardily behind the other press lords, and huffing to catch up. After focus groups found Elle "too boppy" and Vogue "the Bible" of fashion, she decided to create her own "New Testament." "We are pulling out of the recession," she says. "The end is coming. There's hope. Thank God. Let's get rid of denim."
Harper's Bazaar had become so wooden that even a mannequin could have redesigned it; but then, maybe that's not entirely fair. Editing a fashion magazine is like stuffing a capon with larks. If you are not careful, what you shove in can spoil the rich effect of all those luscious ads. To restore the magazine's wind and circulation, Tilberis hired the ingenious Fabien Baron, who once perfected Italian Vogue, and made him creative director; she signed Woody Hochswender, the former New York Times fashion writer, and Wendy Wasserstein, the playwright, to write for her; she recruited Lauren Hutton, the model-impresario, to do special projects. "Enter the Era of Elegance," she declares on a cover that features Linda Evangelista in a net of black and beads by Donna Karan; inside is a well full of images reminiscent of the '40s and '5Os. Hearst spent $2 million promoting the issue. "It's sophisticated and geared to retail advertisers," says Steven Greenberger, director of print media for Grey Advertising. "It's really going to be on the heels of Vogue."
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"Anna will be worried," predicts one very fresh Conde Nasturtium. "It's much better-looking than Vogue." Well, yes and no. For Harper's Bazaar, as for any wish book, the to-die-for question is, "Who wishes to look this way?" Evangelista looks too much like a model; the images inside, sometimes nostalgic, are other times stale. Tilberis says of her maiden voyage, "I don't think it's too retro." She points out that long skirts, this fall's bellwether, have a definite 1947 look and that more kempt, polished makeup and hairstyles are likely to follow. Elegance, she says, is le mot juste, the way to go--"a word that suits the turn of the century."
Fashion is to beauty as infatuation is to love, an obsession that can mistake itself for the real thing, and the reality is that atop the glass mountain at Vogue, Wintour can now suit herself. By beating back Elle, she has fulfilled her mission from Newhouse. Her September issue has 437 pages of ads, a 43 percent market share versus 25 for Harper's Bazaar, 22 for Elle and 10 for Mirabella. Success came at its own price. Vogue under Grace Mirabella was not just about how to look but how to think, how to absorb culture. To go younger does not mean you have to go stupid. But at the very least, Wintour's glitzy imagery and anemic articles have conferred a cheap chic on Vogue: she won at the expense of taste. And in the wide expanse that now yawns between Vogue-Elle at one extreme and Mirabella at the other, Harper's Bazaar hopes to make its way.
What this has meant is that both Wintour and Tilberis have taken their pinking shears to morale around Elle. The magazine's mid-'80s surge has dribbled into a slump. Other fashion magazines adopted Elle's bold photos, sharp graphics and peppy mix of fashions from the streets and from the couture; Elle, overconfident, smug, rested on its design awards. Mirabella's approach has been to search for an identity outside the more conventional perimeter of the fashion magazines. "The new Harper's Bazaar is a nifty example of a certain kind of fashion magazine," she says. "You've seen it before. You will see it again. That would be fine, I guess, if the world and women weren't moving at all." She has accumulated 600,000 very loyal readers, but her ad strength is still relatively puny and her layouts are sometimes staid. It's hard to believe that many women are settling into the bathtub under the bubbles, opening the magazine up and saying, "God, if I were a millionaire, I'd look like this."
Such considerations are what Balenciaga used to call cursi (vulgar); but in a market of 6,000 ad pages that shows no signs of growing, one rag mag can expand only by savaging another. This tug between art and commerce once drove the late Diana Vreeland, who worked for Harper's Bazaar long before she edited Vogue, to explode, "What are we? Haute Couture or Bon Marche?" Who knows? Who cares? Harper's Bazaar is now 125 years old. Vogue is 100. If you stripped them of their eternal quick changes, saw through their rouge, lip blush and false eyelashes, swabbed off their wrinkle eraser, they would look like Hitchcock's granny in the rocker at the end of "Psycho." Who wants that? Let them lay it on. With trowels. Everyone's entitled to a wish.
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