fashion night out: W Abandons High-Fashion Roots Under New Editor

Monday, July 12, 2010

W Abandons High-Fashion Roots Under New Editor

The masthead mayhem that has been sweeping the nation's magazines this summer has not excluded the very top of the chain. W has a new editor-in-chief, Stefano Tonchi, who has already made the executive call to take W away from its high fashion roots and lead it in the direction, much to its readers chagrin, of the more mainstream fashion publications.

This disappoints me for many reasons. W (along with V and international editions) used to be one of the rare magazines I could count on for truly high-fashion, avant-garde editorials and coverage. When the publication started putting celebrities on the cover, I merely overlooked the cover article and focused on the rest of the magazine. No problem. But now, Tonchi has said that he wants the magazine to be "more of a general-interest style magazine." Oh, so another In Style? Fan-tastic.

I fear that too much mainstream interest in fashion over the past five-six years has indelibly changed the industry. Fashion is no longer a niche interest for the truly obsessed, like it was when I was in high school and college (none of the girls on my freshman hall had ever seen an issue of W before, for instance). It now includes celebrity designers, reality television shows, and teenage-blogging sensations. This is definitely not the industry I fell in love with.

With W abandoning its ethos so quickly, I wonder if other magazines will as well. Harper's Bazaar has already pandered to mainstream interests by featuring the Twilight stars, the cast of Jersey Shore, and, of course, a column by Tavi. What would Alexey Brodovitch say? Would he even recognize Bazaar were he to see a present-day issue? Anna Wintour says that fashion is about looking forward, not at the past. Can fashion look forward without abandoning its past? W no longer seems to suggest so....