Fashion Magazines Are Ubiquitous: They Can Be

Fashion magazines are ubiquitous: they can be found on the shelves of nearly every major bookstore, grocery store, and convenience store around the world. Their content is instrumental in stimulating consumer spending as well as on establishing fashion trends. Many fashion magazines also include written content that transcends the world of fashion, from brief biographical sketches of sports celebrities to detailed information about a health care issue. In addition to promoting new consumer-driven trends in clothing, shoes, gadgets, and cosmetics, men's and women's fashion magazines both mirror broad social and cultural trends from sexuality to family structures. Fashion magazines are instrumental for both retailers and for consumers: they help retailers select in advance their product lines and stimulate consumer spending. Furthermore, fashion magazines usually forecast upcoming trends rather than reflecting current crazes. When they hit the shelves, consumers will be inspired to purchase that which is presumably already on the rack in their favorite department stores. For the purposes of this essay, we will examine two American women's fashion magazines, Vogue and Elle, and two American men's fashion magazines Esquire and GQ.

Vogue is one of the most well-known, if not the most well-known women's fashion magazines on the market. Its counterpart Elle serves a similar function but Elle is a smaller-circulation magazine with a slightly different look and feel from Vogue. Target audiences for the two magazines are similar: professional women aged eighteen to forty, but Vogue is probably geared for a slightly older and wealthier demographic. Nevertheless, the two magazines bear striking similarities in their layout and content. Both have at least a dozen double-page advertisements before the Table of Contents. Both include mostly ads for specific designers and cosmetics lines with a splattering of hard alcohol and car ads. Both Vogue and Elle market a combination of low-end and high-end cosmetics, and both advertise a plethora of high-end fashion wear. Vogue's fashion designs are generally aimed for a more conservative and probably older audience than Elle's, which seems trendier and more likely to lure younger readers: women in their twenties and thirties.

Advertisements pervade both Vogue and Elle. Much of the editorial content is really cleverly disguised product placement. For example, Vogue and Elle both have several one-page editorial sections devoted to promoting specific items, which are displayed with tiny photographs and little written blurbs. Usually these one-page editorial sections do not display the products on models, but rather on their own. The magazines' full-page and multi-page fashion photography spreads are means by which designers can market their new lines of clothing. Both magazines also include multi-page paid advertisements that are disguised as articles. Based on an analysis of Vogue and Elle, women's fashion magazines are excellent marketing vehicles for clothing and cosmetics manufacturers and are excellent tools for retailers.

GQ and Esquire are two of the most popular men's fashion magazines in the United States. The two magazines are aimed at a similar target audience: young, probably upwardly mobile professional men. A considerable chunk of these magazines are devoted exclusively to full-page and multi-page advertisements. These advertisements peddle products that range from clothes to cars to cigarettes. The actual ad content is similar between GQ and Esquire. Neither GQ nor Esquire contains full-length articles that are directly about the products advertised in the journal. Rather, the feature articles ranged in content from biographical material to current events to movie reviews. The bulk of the non-paid advertisements are in the form of product placement editorial sections. These one-page "columns" include photographs and small blurbs: they are very similar in function to a catalogue.

In fact, both of these men's magazines contain one-page editorial product-placement blurbs that are similar to those used in the women's fashion magazines. These blurbs are especially useful in the marketing world because they cleverly proffer the editorial stamp of approval on certain products. Consumers who read any one of these magazines would be highly likely to consider buying the products included in these editorial sections.