The big issue

There’s a new fashion season coming and the September issues of the glossies are your required reading.

THE September Issue — no tome quite has the power to define a mood, dictate the pace or determine tastes in the world of fashion, or does it?

What was once seminal to the lifeblood of a $300bn global industry, that critical information leaked annually in glossy format from fashion’s power brokers, seems to be losing its rarefied veneer.

Since 2009’s eponymous cinema hit documenting the production of US Vogue’s September 07 issue under editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, much has changed.

Insider-style trading has been usurped by the pre-eminence of online media, with bloggers and attendant technological advances such as Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram (bought by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for a cool $1bn) making public domain of what was once a velvet rope privilege. With access to next season’s collections sooner, the demand for newness has seemingly created a seismic shift in the magazine calendar. If September is the new January, does that make August the new September?

It would appear so. Increasingly new season collection previews have become part and parcel of the fashion magazine offering, with many appearing as early as mid-summer. Social & Personal editor/publisher PJ Gibbons explains. “Editorial is bought forward to August because consumers are so much more aware of what’s going on. Autumn/ winter would have been shown six months’ previously and they’ll want to see it sooner rather than later.”

Irish Tatler deputy editor Shauna O’Halloran agrees. “Irish women are very savvy,” she says. “They’ve seen what they like on the catwalks and they want to know where they can buy it or something similar in stores around Ireland. So we already gave our readers a sneak peek of what to expect from the catwalks in our July and August issues.” New labels to Ireland that the magazine has targeted are Korean label Morine Comte Marant, coming to Elaine Curtis in Carlow, and Vibe Johansson at Dublin’s Indigo and Cloth.

Much in the same way, retailers are bringing pre-season collections in store as early as July to satiate shoppers looking to stay ahead of the style set. One such example is that of Victoria Beckham’s a/w 12 collection which was reportedly pre-ordered by eager fans at fashion Mecca Brown Thomas before even hitting the shop floor.

With the cat(walk) out of the proverbial bag, just how then do magazines keep that critical interest without losing readers to a one-click culture?

For Irish Tatler the focus has always been on home-grown talent. “We’ve got Amy Huberman for our September front cover,” tells O’Halloran, “but like you’ve never seen her before. Design wise, we are big champions of JW Anderson and Zoe Jordan, both of whom are Irish, and one to watch for us is Dean Quinn, from Enniskillen who is doing great things for the season ahead in simple, geometric shapes. New faces we’re keeping an eye on include Niamh O’Sullivan, a Kildare girl we discovered last year with 1st Option via our Model Search competition. She has had an exciting year, having been to London and Paris for castings, and we will use her on the catwalk for the first time at the Ultimate Girls Day Out over the last weekend in August, where we’ll be casting again for new faces.”

Appetite for newness aside, magazine ad sales are on the rise. The 2011 issue of Vogue, featuring cover girl Kate Moss, was the magazine’s largest since 2007, with 758 pages and $92m dollars in ad revenue.

According to AdWeek, US advertising sales increase for Sept 2012 boast quite voluptuous figures. Elle closed with 400 ad pages, compared to 360 at Harper’s Bazaar, while Marie Clare finished on 237 (including its @Work supplement) — all increases on

2011. Despite healthy revenue reports, some publications are co-opting technological advances to gain an edge on the competition.

Men’s lifestyle magazine GQ is using new app GQ Live to bring augmented reality to its September issue. Advertisements and selected editorial will feature print-to-mobile content extensions allowing for multiple interactive possibilities: videos, 3-d modelling and clicking through to Pinterest or Facebook. Similarly, US Cosmopolitan will feature a unique Print-to-Pin solution where readers can scan watermarked editorial and advertising images to be taken directly to Cosmopolitan’s or the advertiser’s Pinterest page. The reader will then be given the option to pin the image to their pin board, re-pin more images or follow the brand.

No doubt, it’s a brave new world. The question is whether the September issue will hold or fold its legendary gravitas. Tank magazine’s executive fashion editor, Caroline Issa, shares her viewpoint. “If anything, I think September print issues are going to be even more collectable than ever as they’re a wonderful archive piece to see the new collections curated from a publication’s viewpoint. Online magazines and social media will surely have more timely news on a minute-by-minute basis, but print magazines, especially the March and September issues, serve as a wonderful marker of time”

If eBay is any indication, the ninth month could well wind up fetching decent shekels at auction too. US Vogue’s 2007 September issue, as featured in the box office hit, is currently selling for €128.11, while a limited edition 50th anniversary issue of 2009’s Vogue Australia clocks in at €254.95.

As for the future, the collaborative possibilities between print and online have legs as long as Naomi. We could well be looking at a hologram of Anna Wintour reading her editor’s letter, or maybe a 3-D video of the new Chanel collections directed by the Kaiser himself. Now that would be worth the cover price.