The Vogue Factor by Kirstie Clements

Author:Kirstie Clements [Kirstie Clements]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2013-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

8

THE EDITOR’S CHAIR

I began at Vogue as the receptionist just as the September 1985 issue was on stand. Now here I was starting as editor, with the September 1999 issue just about to launch.

September issues are traditionally the biggest during the calendar year because they contain the most advertising and editorial pages. This one also happened to be Vogue Australia’s fortieth anniversary issue, and two parties and exhibitions had been planned for both Sydney and Melbourne. I literally walked into events I had made no contribution to whatsoever, which felt terribly awkward. All I wanted to do was get to my desk and fix the magazine. The way it looked, there was nothing to celebrate. Circulation had taken a massive drop and there were no forward ad bookings. There was one page for the October issue, but it was FOC (free of charge) to compensate for a mistake made with the client in the previous edition. At least Robyn Holt had a sense of humour about the state of affairs. We spent a few minutes in her office grimly amusing ourselves by moving the single ad around the empty magazine grid, seeing where it looked best.

I had no time to start the November issue from scratch, so I kept and cleaned up what had already been commissioned, submitted and was passable. The rest of the magazine I filled with lifts. ‘Lifts’ are stories that have already appeared in other Condé Nast magazines that are usually available for free, or at a much less expensive rate than it would cost to produce yourself. Financial controllers are big fans of lifts, for obvious reasons. Readers hate them; a savvy reader also buys international magazines, so there can be an overlap in what they are being presented.

There was also—rightly so—an element of reader indignation about us not using enough homegrown talent, and we were sometimes accused, unfairly, of lacking our own ideas. Lifts have become almost obligatory for most licensed titles now, as editors are no longer allocated editorial budgets that can cover the costs of creating every page from scratch. Vogues that are owned and operated by Condé Nast tend to produce all their own material, whereas titles that are under licence to proprietors in other regions, such as Australia, are generally a mix of original material and lifts. I believe there is a place for well-chosen lifts in a luxury title, to make sure all the talent represented consistently remains first-rate. It was not always possible for us to secure the top international models or celebrities of the moment, which is why we sometimes needed to rely on republishing fashion stories and articles from our sister publications such as US, British or Paris Vogue. But now the cost pressure in the magazine industry to repurpose non-original material is enormous. The day is fast approaching when a magazine and its website will only be full of lifts, promotional shots handed out by clients, and staff Instagrams. And there will be a whole

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