Paper giants … (from left) fashion magazine editors Jess Blanch, Justin Cullen and Kellie Hush. Photo: Marco Del Grande
Many snide, undermining comments have been made since Justine Cullen was appointed editor of Elle Australia, but the sniping reached a new low with the spreading of a story that she'd ordered a shamanic cleansing of her new Park Street offices. Yes, it is true that Bauer Media is launching a local version of Elle, a global fashion magazine, in Australia next month at a time when magazine circulation is in decline, and titles such as Grazia and Madison have ingloriously closed. And yes, it is true that the Elle team has moved into the Sydney offices at Bauer that formerly housed Madison, which even to the non-superstitious seems a little ill-starred. But no, this does not mean that Cullen, who was appointed in March, hired a shaman to cleanse the space. "It's one of those things where you're like, really? Really?" she says.
It's been a tumultuous time of late in fashion magazines. Where once the glossies dispensed fashion news to the masses like Moses descending the mountain, they now find themselves just one voice in a very crowded, fast-moving space. The latest clothes are on the net moments after the models leave the catwalk; they're on blogs and apps, websites and Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. Fashion itself has changed - the clothes now have to fight for attention with the celebrities in the front row and the fashion bloggers outside the tent wearing outfits as outré as those inside.
Fashion has always dealt in fantasy, but that fantasy is no longer locked safely away in the pages of hallowed magazines. It's out there, all around us, the constantly changing backdrop to our lives.
"It's not about dictating" … Elle editor Justine Cullen. Photo: James Brickwood
While fashion magazine circulation in Australia hasn't dipped as much as people might think - over the last 10 years, Vogue is down only 5 per cent and Harper's Bazaar has remained steady - advertising revenue has shattered like a dropped champagne glass. In the last year, it's plummeted by 20 per cent and the decline began long before that. This means, in turn, that budgets have shrunk, jobs have been lost and titles have been closed.
The coup de grâce came in May last year when the queen of this world, Vogue editor Kirstie Clements, was unceremoniously sacked and departed the building where she had reigned for 13 years. It had a domino effect across the headquarters of magazines in Sydney: as Edwina McCann was crowned the new queen at Vogue, Kellie Hush moved from Grazia to take McCann's former editor's role at Harper's Bazaar and sundry other players moved up, down, sideways - or out.
To some, the shake-up was overdue and exhilarating, but to others it was unsettling. An industry that once had such fixed stars now seemed built on shifting sands. People and titles began to appear no more enduring than the trends they were reporting on. Fear seeped in, and with it nerves and a hint of paranoia. Hush is not alone in saying she's never known the industry to be so skittish and catty. "It's quite nasty out there at the moment," she says.
So when the bright shiny ball of Elle - with its Sydney launch party at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia in April and its enviable 300-plus pages - was tossed into the mix, the reaction was sure to be intense. And when established players were passed over for the editorship in favour of someone with no high-fashion experience, who'd come from the mass-market Shop 'Til You Drop, the knives came out.
When I meet Kellie Hush in her office, wearing a black Bottega Veneta dress and Céline shoes, with a bob one can't help comparing to that of US Vogue's editor Anna Wintour, she looks as you imagine a fashion editor would look, only less made-up. She has the air of someone who's used to commanding a team, and a working mother's impatience - she has two daughters, aged 7 and 4 - to get as much as possible done in every moment. When I ask about readership statistics, she swivels her chair over to a filing cabinet and lays her hand on them instantly. She exudes efficiency and control.
She's also frank about how difficult it was to take over Harper's Bazaar when McCann left. "It was a shit-fight, to be quite honest. I basically resigned from Grazia and walked up here. There was no team - Edwina took the deputy editor, the fashion director, two fashion assistants - there was just nobody here and the September issue was in production."
All the editors I talk to work long hours, but back then, Hush's hours were insane. The reality of a fashion magazine editor's life is a far cry from what most of us imagine.
In Kirstie Clements' memoir, The Vogue Factor, she talks of being flown first-class to Cannes, then helicoptered to Monte Carlo for the four-day launch of a perfume called Sun Moon Stars: the best hotels, gala dinners, credit cards to use at will, and the bizarre final announcement that they'd each had a star named after them (after all that, the fragrance never appeared). But those days are gone. Hush is still invited to mascara launches in Paris, but she can't go. There's no money. No time.
Granted, there's a Gucci bag in the corner of her office - a gift from Gucci - and we talk about her twice-yearly three-week trips to the fashion shows in Milan and Paris. When she went recently, she had dinner with Valentino, and Karl Lagerfeld sent her flowers. But her hotel was a drab affair in the suburbs; there's no budget for anything better. And when she got back each night, usually just before midnight, she had to answer dozens of emails and essentially put out her magazine from the other side of the world. "It's an amazing thing to do, but it's a tough three weeks," she says.
Harper's Bazaar has been around for almost 150 years, and it's always been, in Hush's words, about "the most expensive things you can find in the store". That's why she insists Bauer's decision to launch Elle is not an attack from within. She and Cullen say the titles are clearly different: Elle is the sunny younger sister to Harper's Bazaar's dramatically dressed older sibling. But there is no denying that both magazines will be competing for the same shrinking advertising dollar.
Hush's response is to take her niche luxury magazine and make it even more pointy-end. She thinks Vogue under McCann has skewed a bit younger, a bit more mass-market. She is keeping her sights firmly on women in their late 30s - who might actually buy the clothes - and hoping advertisers will follow.
I meet Justine Cullen, 37, hours before she's due to get on a plane for Turkey with her second husband and their seven-month-old boy, while her older two boys go away with their father. The holiday was booked before she landed the job at Elle and she's worrying about whether she's packed enough nappies and who will do the point-of-sale collateral while she's away. "Don't worry, I'll be working the whole time I'm there," she assures me, though I haven't asked. We talk on the white leather couch in her spartan office, which, despite the roses on the table, looks only half moved into. She began this job when her son, Scout, was only 12 weeks old, and talks in mock horror about only having maternity clothes and no time to shop. She has a more bohemian style than Hush, with mauve nails and a tattoo peeking out from between the black straps of her Jimmy Choos. Her skin glows golden next to her Willow shirt.
The publisher of Elle, Peter Holder, says Cullen has wanted the job from birth, and he's only exaggerating a little. She began work experience at Dolly, in the same building, when she was in year 8, and interned at the earlier incarnation of Elle (it was launched here in 1990 and closed in 2002). She wrote about beauty at Marie Claire for 14 years and during her five-year editorship of Shop 'Til You Drop took it to its highest-ever circulation. "I just always knew I wanted to work in magazines," she says. Cullen fought heroically to get the gig at Elle. The magazine is a joint venture between Bauer, Hearst Magazines International in New York, and Lagardère Active, the licensor, in France. Cullen was interviewed twice in New York, twice in Paris, and a few times in Sydney, too. "We did speak to some big-name candidates," says Holder. "And yes, Justine probably didn't carry the higher-end experience some of those candidates did. But it was unanimous that she understood the DNA of Elle better, by a country mile, than any of the other candidates."
The obvious question is, why Elle? And why now? When the launch was announced earlier this year, the market was deeply sceptical about making a title work that only 11 years ago, in a more buoyant market, had closed. But the earlier problems were less to do with circulation - it was a healthy 60,000 a month, with profit just shy of $1 million a year - and more to do with problems between the joint venture partners who took it over.
"If you don't launch [a title], everything will be in decline," Holder says. "You have to launch to get our business going again."
When Cullen talks about Elle, she speaks the language of someone who's been to many marketing and brand-positioning meetings. The magazine's voice will be warm, inclusive, engaging; irreverent, funny, and very modern. In the crowded space of fashion, magazines carve out their identities partly by what they're not, and Elle will be "a much more relaxed, conversational experience than a [magazine like] Vogue. It's not about dictating," Cullen says. Nor will it be like Marie Claire, with hard news. "I think it's quite a '90s concept to have shoes on one page and doom and gloom on the next."
Elle is going after women in their mid-20s, but this is a fickle demographic. These women are the most digitally savvy; the most agile and least committed. So Elle is turning the traditional magazine launch on its head, with the website having gone live earlier this month, and the magazine going on sale a month later.
Holder is committed to 300-plus-page books for the first three issues - if that's the case, the magazine should stand out for its size alone - and he's aiming for circulation of 60,000 at launch: an ambitious target given Vogue sells around 50,000 copies and Marie Claire around 90,000.
Jackie Frank has been editor and publisher of Marie Claire for 18 years: one of the industry's most fixed stars. She is upbeat about the impact of Elle. "It will create a lot of noise and buzz, which I think is fantastic, because hopefully they will drive people into the newsagents. And we'll be sitting at the newsagent with them."
The person who has most reason to be worried is McCann, as Elle is aiming to steal Vogue's readers, many of whom are in their mid-20s. After initially agreeing to be interviewed by the(sydney)magazine, McCann later declined. I approached many in the industry to comment on how Vogue is faring under her, but few wanted to go on the record. Off-the-record opinion was divided between those who believe she's made it younger, more lively, with a better web presence, and those who feel that she hasn't quite lived up to the new-broom expectations after she took over in such dramatic circumstances.
Everyone agrees she's probably nervous. Frank believes, as does media analyst Steve Allen from Fusion Strategy, that the rapid decline of newspapers, and the much vaunted "death of print", has cast a pall over magazines that is not warranted. Readership is notoriously difficult to measure (another reason advertisers might prefer the easily-measured eyeballs of digital), but Frank puts Marie Claire's at 450,000 people a month. "We have no problems with audience; we have a problem with advertising. Advertising has gone for the shiny and new, but the audience is still there and still strong." Titles such as Cleo and Cosmopolitan may have fallen off a cliff, but a good title, properly aimed, can remain strong - or in the case of Russh, even flourish.
At just 33, Jess Blanch is the editor-in-chief and publisher of one Australian fashion magazine with budgets that are growing, not shrinking. She got the gig not because she clawed her way up from the reception desk, as Clements famously did, but because she's married to the man whose family owns the company, Switzer Media + Publishing, which publishes Russh. She'd never edited a magazine before she took the job. Never worked for a fashion mag. And she's outperformed expectations.
In the three and a half years since Switzer bought the title and Blanch took over, Russh's advertising revenue has doubled every year. Her team has grown from three to 17, including an art director and fashion director in London, and a contributing fashion editor in Paris. Circulation is still modest at about 22,000, but another 14,000 copies go overseas and the magazine is gaining international credibility all the time. In her memoir, Clements devoted no more than a single phrase to Russh, dismissing it as an "indie mag", but today it boasts advertising from Tiffany & Co, Chanel and Hermès. "If Edwina wrote a book and wrote us up as an indie mag, I don't think I'd be very happy," says Blanch.
The other fashion mags are housed in corporate offices, but Russh nestles in an old Masonic hall in Woollahra, with soaring ceilings and arched windows. Blanch comes in to meet me with a wide smile free of lipstick, her long brown hair perfectly tousled. In black Balenciaga pants and a black cashmere jumper, she looks like a woman who's made just the right amount of effort. She has a habit of leaning back and running her hands up her neck into her scalp, so her hair tumbles down in waves. Other editors have a businesslike manner, but Blanch gives the illusion of being above the concerns of commerce.
Which is not true, of course. Being a successful magazine editor these days means being, first and foremost, a successful businesswoman, and Blanch works as hard as the rest. She could never finish her morning walks because half way through she'd remember an email she simply had to get to immediately (she now has a personal trainer). One of her biggest wins has been to get high-end advertisers such as Net-a-Porter, Mercedes-Benz and Skyy Vodka in her magazine to spill over into the Russh app, which was named as one of Apple's top six Newsstand apps for 2012.
Vogue may still be the first title on every luxury fashion house's list, but Russh's success shows how untethered advertising has become. Whether Elle can similarly lure advertising remains to be seen, but you can be sure everyone will be watching. Thank goodness it's just fashion. "It's not like anyone will die if I f... it up," says Cullen.
FASHION MAGAZINE EDITOR'S CHECKLIST
1. Manage staff and budgets.
2. Liaise with advertisers, network, act as a brand ambassador and organise reader events.
3. Secure knockout covers, exclusive stories and aspirational fashion spreads that lift a reader out of everyday life.
4. Oversee digital elements including websites, apps, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
5. Continue producing a product that looks a million bucks on an ever-shrinking budget. Jackie Frank says the job now is harder than ever. "I'm publisher and editor. There was a time when that was two jobs. Now it's like 10 jobs because you've got to think in so many different ways."
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