Deflation Hits Fashion Magazines

The September Back-To-School Blues have now hit fashion magazines.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting Once-Hefty September Editions Lose Ads as Apparel Marketers Cut Back and Experiment More Online.

Please consider Thick Fashion Magazines Are So Last Year.

Fashion magazines' September issues are usually nice and fat, bursting with new looks for cold weather. This year, some are almost as skinny as the models inside.

Behind the relatively svelte issues are newly frugal fashion advertisers, slashing their budgets in the recession and experimenting with putting more ad dollars to use on the Web.

High-end fashion brands such as Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Emporio Armani, Dolce & Gabbana and Prada are still buying ads in the glossy pages of Condé Nast's Vogue and W, Hachette Filipacchi's Elle, Time Warner's InStyle and Hearst's Harper's Bazaar. But most of the September issues, which started showing up on newsstands last week, are almost a third slimmer than last year's batch.

Ad pages in Vogue tumbled 36%, to 429. That's a far cry from 2007, when Vogue trumpeted its September issue as a record-setter among monthly consumer magazines, with a total of 840 pages -- 727 of them ads -- and weighing in at 4 pounds, 9 ounces.

As they spend less on magazines, the fashion companies are gingerly testing a range of lower-cost, often more measurable outlets. These include social messaging site Twitter, Google's video site YouTube, fashion and culture email newsletter DailyCandy.com and Glam Media, an Internet property targeted at women. They are reallocating some of their marketing dollars to buy space in new features on magazine Web sites, such as a shopping tool on Condé Nast's Style.com that will launch during New York Fashion Week in September.

I'm waiting for the fashion magazines to find me but it could be a long wait. My site demographics certainly have the right wage group with 70% making more than $75,000 per year. I also have the right education group with 78.8% having at least a bachelors degree. An astonishing 19.5% of my readership is corporate level executive or higher.

Unfortunately one little statistic might keep the high fashion club away: A mere 8.8% of my readership is female.



click on chart for sharper image

Those stats are from a year ago but I doubt much has changed since then. Female readers, where are you?

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
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