🟧 Fashion magazine covers are too boring
& the Italian newsletter landscape.
Hello from Milan, or actually 20 minutes outside of Milan at a Brutalist-postmodern hotel where I’m speaking at a conference held by ROI Edizioni, the Italian publisher of Filterworld. While here, I’ve picked up some gossip on Italian digital media. The rest of this One Thing edition is an essay by Chris Erik Thomas on the all-gray ennui of current fashion magazine covers, starting with an-ex British Vogue editor’s new publication. — Kyle Chayka
Italian media is going creator economy, too
by Kyle Chayka
Andrea Girolami is a journalist and content strategist who worked at MTV and Condé Nast’s international titles in Milan. But lately he has become a kind of creator in his own right with his popular (Italian) Instagram and newsletter, Scrolling Infinito. Now he consults with writers and influencers about how to make it in the new digital ecosystem. (The Milan Brian Morrissey?) When we hung out, he mentioned that Italian voices are moving on to Substack-style independence too, and thriving. Here are two worth knowing about.
Vale Tutto (“Anything Goes”) by Selvaggia Lucarelli
Lucarelli is an Italian blogging pioneer turned TV personality turned Substack superstar, writing about gossip, celebrity, and the internet. She runs the biggest newsletter in Italy (176k subscribers) and has surpassed €1M in annual revenue from subscribers — placing her among the top 50 Substacks worldwide. She translated wider fame into newsletter success. (Like the UK’s Emily Maitlis?)
Rockandfiocc by Giulia Torelli
One of the leading Italian newsletters on Substack (71k subscribers). She recently launched a premium paid tier and has built one of the strongest creator communities in Italy. Giulia is steadily transforming her content and personal brand, covering lifestyle and fashion, into a full-fledged media ecosystem, spanning a YouTube channel, paid newsletter, and social accounts. (Could be Italy’s Emily Sundberg?)
72 is a boldly boring new fashion magazine
by Chris Erik Thomas
It happened at night. There I was, in the midst of my ritualistic brain-smoothing exercise of scrolling through social media until I lose all sense of space and time. Suddenly, I saw evil incarnate: another drab, grey backdrop haunting a fashion magazine cover. This time, the demon appeared on the first issue of 72, a confusingly named print publication launched last week by fashion industry mainstay Edward Enninful, the former editor-in-chief of British Vogue.
It seems that in fashion, you either die an icon or live long enough to see yourself launch your own unnecessary publication. There were high hopes for Enninful in February when he soft-launched EE72, a “global media and entertainment company” (because, apparently, the world needs another one), and circled September as the launch for the magazine. In the world of print media, Enninful is a legend. At 18, he made history at i-D as the youngest-ever fashion director for an international publication, spent a chunk of his 20s contributing to Italian and American Vogue, worked as the style director of W magazine, and made history again as British Vogue’s first Black, male EIC — and the only Black editor in history to head any of the 26 Vogue magazines.
During the Enninful era, everyone from Oprah Winfrey and Rihanna to Adwoa Aboah graced the cover, while digital traffic increased 51 percent and they attracted 140 new advertisers. It was a far cry from the reign of the previous EIC, Alexandra Shulman, who seemed allergic to platforming anyone who wasn’t a white man; only 12 out of 306 covers she produced featured Black women. Enninful slipping away from Anna’s exacting eye to build a new venture seemed the kind of bold jolt the industry needed, but the only jolt I’m getting from the cover is the shock of witnessing such a misfire.
For issue 001, cinematic icon Julia Roberts is reduced to a pallid imitation of herself—giving high fashion “smize” when her radiant smile is her best asset—while awkwardly posed and badly styled; the combination of a dark grey coat with a dark grey collared shirt, accessorized with chunky, matronly jewelry, and set against the drab grey backdrop feels a hate crime. Even the text is a mess; the 72 is rendered in a violent shade of electric pink, the list of celebrities in the issue is centered under it in yellow, while “Julia Roberts interviewed by George Clooney” is written in three font sizes, spaced across two lines, and uses two mismatched font colors. Squinting to see the “POWERED BY EE72” in the top right corner just confirms that this entire production has the vibe of a corporate-funded, in-flight magazine.
Some magazine covers are better than others
I don’t know exactly when it happened, but at some point in the past few years, it feels as if a curse has been cast on creative teams around the world. They’ve become compelled en masse to produce the most uninspired photoshoots possible by propping cover stars like cardboard cutouts in front of sterile, grey backdrops. Squint and it almost feels like a creative homage to the 1950s and '60s, when magazines moved from illustration to actual photography for their front covers. However, even that major shift soon settled into a boring, formulaic approach to “timelessness,” as models were typically photographed from the shoulders up inside a studio, in front of a solid-colored backdrop. It was all very “Irving Penn core,” which makes sense given that the master of classic mid-century portraits produced 165 covers for Vogue over a span of 66 years.
The act of exhumation that modern creative teams are engaging in may attempt to mimic this early style, but like most modern cultural references to the past, covers like 72 are missing a sense of soul. There are some bright spots. Last week’s i-D and GQ covers may have let the Grey Backdrop Demon on set, but they made up for it in concept: i-D featured an eight-month-old baby as part of their “Born Yesterday” issue, while GQ’s “State of the American Male” issue saw Glenn Powell donning grotesquely bulging muscle padding to skewer hypermasculinity. And we’ll always have the three-year creative streak of Vogue China Editor-in-Chief Margaret Zhang, who pumped out colorful, creatively engaging covers before she abruptly left her post (to have a child with R&B singer Miguel!).
Fashion magazines used to be powerhouses, capable of shaping culture through a single issue. That era is long over. The print magazine industry is a shell of itself, and social media has made it so that cover reveals are now sandwiched between everything from content dumps of that friend of a friend you met at a bar once to videos of people fiendishly devouring the latest viral food. In the real world, seeing these fashion magazines means either stumbling upon one at an airport gift shop or seeking it out in a specialty store devoted to print publications.
The dull thud of 72’s first issue is disappointing, of course, but it’s also a sign of the times. The fashion industry at large is in the midst of a global slowdown, while individual brands seem to meld together into one, big, boring ode to “quiet luxury” — the fashion style defined by eye-wateringly expensive clothing that looks indistinguishable from low-quality dupes sold at the likes of COS, Uniqlo, and Zara. There’s a distinct lack of creativity permeating the industry, and it’s reflected in both the brand’s advertising and the magazine’s covers—two key tools for selling an entire aspirational dream.
It’s easy to settle into hopelessness about the state of the modern fashion magazine, but there may be hope on the horizon. Over the next few weeks, the fashion industry will witness an unprecedented wave of debut collections from new designers at established fashion houses—there will be 15 in total, from Chanel and Versace to Jil Sander and Bottega Veneta. After seasons of dull, safe clothing paraded down runways around the world, a tangible air of excitement has been building in anticipation of this new era. I can only hope that this same air filters into the offices of fashion magazines. Vogue’s legendary editor-at-large Andre Leon Talley once said: “It’s a famine of beauty, honey! My eyes are starving for beauty.” The world is difficult enough to withstand without the dreary grey backdrop demon haunting photo shoots. If print is going to survive at all, magazine covers have to actually be interesting. Our eyes have seen enough ugly.1
Chris Erik Thomas is a Berlin-based writer and editor whose work spotlights trends and talent in the realms of fashion, art, and culture. They've previously worked as the digital editor for Art Düsseldorf, and their words have appeared in Highsnobiety, ARTnews, The Face, BBC, Out Magazine, Paper, and more.
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PS: I actually had a dream one night while writing this essay that I was offered a job as an Associate Editor for 72 in exchange for scrapping this essay. Obviously, a stable staff role at a media publication is the stuff of dreams, so the only logical conclusion for this subconscious penetration is that it was the work of a Grey Backdrop Demon trying to coerce me into false financial security and stop me from writing my truth. But I will not let the demon win.
Here for the PS