Design*Sponge: r.i.p jane

The premiere issue of Jane (L) and the current issue

The Style Page has reported on the demise of CARGO (Lucky for men) and SHOP Etc. (Lucky rip-off) magazines. Now comes news via Design*Sponge that Jane magazine will cease publication with its August 2007 issue.

The New York Times also reported on the demise of Jane in its article A Women’s Magazine That Tried to Be Otherwise. The authors described Jane as the grown-up version of Sassy, the groundbreaking, but now defunct, teen magazine. Detroit-based conservative columnist Debbie Schlussel has her own take on Jane's demise: So sad, too bad ...

I find the way that titles such as Glamour, Marie Claire, Vogue, and O conflate articles on fashion and beauty with articles on social and political issues jarring. Moreover, these magazines don't reflect my views on social and political issues. I also dislike the way that magazines geared toward women in their 20s and 30s are obsessed with sex. No wonder I prefer magazines such as Lucky and InStyle, which don't contain such articles.

Shop ETC is no more

Shop ETC. ceased publication with its October 2006 issue.

Looking for Shop ETC on the newstand? Then read this notice from its publisher Hearst Magazines:

Due to the challenging economy and rising paper and postal costs, SHOP Etc. will be discontinued after the October issue. more

My first impression of Shop ETC is that it was a blatant rip-off of Lucky. However, Shop ETC. began to grow on me, and I became a subscriber.

Frankly, I'm surprised that Shop ETC lasted as long as it did (about two years). While its graphic design was ho-hum compared to Lucky, I did find individual items of interest in its pages, like this Spanx "Tight-End" Tights Five-Day-a-Workweek set.

PS Rising paper costs??!! Then why I am getting more unsolicited mail-order catalogues than ever?

WHAT'S NEW: Media

The Media page on The Style Page has undergone major changes.

The media page links to three major publishers of lifestyle magazines in the U.S:

Conde Nast - publishers of Allure, Architectural Digest, Cargo, Lucky, Vogue, and Domino, the shopping magazine for the home, which will debut in April 2005. Conde Nast is already seeking charter subscribers on the basis of a sneak peak into a few of the pages of Domino.

Time Inc. - publishers of InStyle, People, REAL SIMPLE, Southern Living, Sunset, and of course, Time.

Hearst Corporation - publishers of Cosmo, Marie Claire, O (Oprah), and SHOP Etc. While I was critical of SHOP Etc., it's growing on me, even though their style is still too frou-frou for me. I bought the first three issues at the newsstand, and then decided that it was time to subscribe.

The media page features links to Fashion and lifestyle coverage from major newspapers, such as the International Herald Tribune, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Telegraph (UK). Please note that access to online coverage for these publications might require registration or even a paid subscription.

Finally, the media page features links to "new" publishing ventures, such as femail.co.uk (featuring Trinny and Elizabeth of BBC's What Not to Wear), handbag.co.uk, and MochaSofa from Canada.

For those of you who track this blog via news aggregators such as Bloglines, you can track updates to The Style Page web site by subscribing to http://www.thestylepage.com/thestylepage.xml

I hope that you like the updates to the Media page. You can subscribe to many of the magazines listed here through amazon.com.

Yahoo News - Cheaper Chic Spills Into Vogue

Categories: Fashion, Media, Magazines

Yahoo News - Cheaper Chic Spills Into Wintour'sVogue

"[The] 832-page September issue hitting newsstands this week is the magazine's biggest ever, with 647 ad pages and weighing around 4 pounds."

This article notes that shopping titles such as Lucky are much cheaper to produce than Vogue and Harper's BAZAAR. What it didn't mention that Lucky is much more honest than other fashion magazines in that women's magazines are about delivering the audience to its advertisers and Lucky is unabashed about its purpose. Magazines such as Vogue and Marie Claire feature both fashion and social commentary witihin its pages. For example, the September 2004 issue of Vogue had articles about John Kerry's daughters (photographed in couture gowns) and a former punk rock singer now with the leftist MoveOn.org and a review of a book on India that perpetuates the image of that country as poor, dysfunctional, and corrupt.

This article first brought to my attention SHOP Etc., a new magazine from the Hearst Corporation (which also publishes Harper's BAZAAR, Cosmo, and Oprah's O), designed to compete with Lucky. SHOP Etc. uses the metaphor of a store with departments for fashion, home, and beauty and includes bifold pages to demarcate each department. While Lucky has its Lucky Breaks and stickers page, SHOP Etc. has coupon inserts.

Overall, I am not excited about SHOP Etc., because it's nowhere as visually appealing as Lucky. This magazine will probably go the way of HotDots, another shopping title that tried to integrate a print format and web shopping, which discontinued publication after only a few issues.