FASHION 89/Magazines : Tale of Two Editors and Two Magazines : Ex-Vogue Mogul Mirabella Puts Personal Stamp on New Monthly
Most magazine editors are as anonymous as garden snails. Not Grace Mirabella.
In the intersecting worlds of fashion and media, the former Vogue editor and tastemaker is as famous as Hulk Hogan is with wrestling fans.
She is so famous, really, that her euphonious last name will be emblazoned across the cover of a new magazine--for its status andits potential to tempt women across the land. Launched from the empire of Australian press lord Rupert Murdoch, Mirabella, due on newsstands late this month, is one of the most widely anticipated magazines in years, maybe decades.
A Trifle Edgy
And that makes Mirabella, the person, a trifle edgy.
“I’m still having trouble adjusting to the fact that my name’s on it. . . . It’s very nervous-making,” she said in a telephone interview. “It’s definitely not my handwriting,” she added, explaining that her penmanship is indecipherable compared with the casual but readable scribble that will be the magazine’s logo.
There are good reasons to be apprehensive--the general air of hoopla and heightened expectation accompanying the long-awaited launch and the big-deal blastoff party, which supposedly will be stuffed tighter than the Tokyo subway with other famous types, in New York next week. Although the 59-year-old Mirabella, whose new title is publications director, insists that her namesake is a broadly inclusive “style” magazine, there’s no question that it will be going up against her former employer Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Elle, as well as a score or more of others in the highly competitive and crowded fashion magazine field.
Then there’s the dramatic factor. The magazine’s debut marks the return of Mirabella--the editor dumped unceremoniously from Vogue last summer after 17 years as editor-in-chief--to the monthly magazine fray. In the fashion world this is the equivalent of a Chuck Norris movie. (The supreme insult--and inspiration of filmic comparisons--was that Mirabella reportedly learned of her firing through a gossip columnist.)
Despite the elements of glamour and white-gloved hand-to-hand combat, Mirabella herself seems more concerned with creating and producing an innovative magazine for intelligent, well-heeled women who like clothes but are not slaves to fashion. She dismissed what’s been going on at Vogue in her absence with the comment, “It’s not doing anything I would do, which is why I’m not there anymore.” And her new creation is not a form of revenge, she insisted. “This is not an ego trip. It’s a serious magazine effort.”
Mirabella’s conception of what a magazine should be and whom it should appeal to is a blend of the eclectic and the exclusive. “We see it as a style magazine--style of dressing and style in thought,” she said, noting that under this rubric, style also includes politics, business, psychology, fiction, medicine and the performing arts.
The first issue, which hit at least one Los Angeles newsstand this week even though national distribution isn’t supposed to be until the end of the month, contains an excerpt from a biography of singer-dancer Josephine Baker, an article about dancer Suzanne Farrell’s journey to the Soviet Union, an essay on the anti-abortion movement and an interview with the psychiatrist of Hedda Nussbaum, the live-in companion of lawyer Joel Steinberg who was convicted of manslaughter in the shocking and highly publicized death of Lisa, a 6-year-old girl being raised by the couple. On the lighter side, the issue also contains a guessing game on which lip prints belong to which famous women.
Had Sneak Preview
Magazine veteran Wilma Jordan, who played a key role in the launch of New York Woman, was surprised after a sneak preview of the slightly oversized magazine. “I had expected it to be much more of a how-to fashion book,” she said. “It’s much more extensive in scope than the typical fashion magazine. . . . I think it’ll be a huge success because the women’s market needs stronger editorial product.”
Mirabella emphasized that the magazine will not be trendy and will cater to women with a well-developed sense of self. For one thing, Mirabella believes that there’s been too much of “fashion as spectacle, fashion as entertainment” in this decade. The result is that consumers haven’t had access to enough practical but refined information about clothes, she said.
“The reader will be 35, a little older, a little younger . . . and not be content to discuss the latest color or the latest pair of roller skates,” she said. “The point is to be very pointed, very selective. We’re not going to have a little bit of everything. We’re not going to try to amuse all the people all the time.”
Actually, the magazine’s circulation target is 600,000, a modest number of people to amuse monthly compared with Vogue’s 1.2 million and Elle’s 825,000.
If some of Mirabella’s concept sounds a little vague, it may be intentional. Mirabella herself says that the magazine has been developed on instinct and without the usual array of demographic studies that pinpoint readers by geography, income and spending patterns.
On occasion, this apparent lack of focus has confused observers or made them wonder whether the people behind Mirabella, which is being launched at a time of economic uncertainty for magazines, have a game plan. Most prominently, the magazine seems to have switched its target audience from an average age of about 40 to the mid-30s, a shift that speaks volumes to competitors.
“I’ve heard so many conflicting reports,” said Anne Fuchs, publisher of Elle. “First that they’re for older women and then that they don’t want to be older.” Along with others, Fuchs said that Mirabella’s personal prestige is enough to carry the magazine for several issues, but that ultimately the product will have to prove itself. “In Oshkosh, they’ve never heard of Grace Mirabella. . . . I think the first two issues will be, ‘Thank you, Grace,’ from the fashion industry, which owes her a lot,” Fuchs said.
Marty Walker, a magazine consultant whose clients have included Time, Inc., noted that the fashion magazine market is now much more of a free-for-all than in the past, which may create an opening for Mirabella. “For years Vogue owned it (the fashion market) and (Harper’s) Bazaar was number two. Then Elle came along and shook up everything.” Walker also said he isn’t bothered by any perceived lack of acute focus at Mirabella. “Designing magazines is not like designing atomic bombs,” he said. “It’s very much an evolutionary process.”
On the other hand, there are those who are favorably impressed with the seat-of-the-pants aspects of Mirabella. “I for one am tired of hearing about this (demographic) pinpointing, frankly,” said Paul Benjou, executive vice president of the New York advertising firm Doyle Graf Raj.
120 Ad Pages
Benjou said he was most impressed with the fact that the magazine, which has 120 ad pages in the first issue, will carry no mass-distributed cosmetics advertising. “The cosmetics clutter has become very evident in a lot of magazines,” he said. “They’re not going to prostitute themselves to take on a group of products that might lead them away from (their) vision.”
Asked to rate Mirabella’s chances of success, Benjou pegged them at 98% and added, “As a matter of fact I asked them if they had stock available in the magazine.”
Hershel Sarbin, a magazine consultant and former president of Ziff-Davis publishers, also forecast success for Mirabella. “I would never bet against something to which Rupert Murdoch has committed himself,” he said.
