The InStyle logo, with all of its equity, trust, fun, and benevolent relationship with fashion and celebrity, is the entrée. We might dress up the plate and serve it a bit differently, but I’m not all of a sudden putting couscous on the plate if I’ve never done couscous! You can’t call it formulaic because it is what it is—that’s what the cover needs to look like. Do you ever worry about that cover “meal” getting stale? I don’t worry about it being boring—I worry that you won’t instantly recognize InStyle when you’re looking for it. We play with the elements, too: Are the shoes showing or not? Is the subject crouching or not crouching? Is it a beauty shot? What entices the reader to buy the magazine? If the reader is choosing to buy fewer magazines, or spending her time elsewhere, it helps if she loves our brand. We’ve grown with our reader. I’ve been here four years as the editor, but I had worked here before as a senior editor for many years, so I have a great institutional understanding of why the magazine does what it does and did what it did. From the moment I got here, I’ve spoken to the team about making sure we’re caught up with the reader—and often one step ahead of her. How has the magazine changed over the years? When InStyle launched, it was focused on celebrity lifestyle. It was about using celebrity to get in as an access point to everything. Now, we don’t necessarily need to peg what’s happening in fashion to celebrity. Why not? We’re using celebrity to illustrate things in fashion, but we don’t use it to validate. We have our own expertise. Six years ago, we’d tell you to try a blush because Julia Roberts wears it—that was the point of enthusiasm. Now, our beauty director, Amy Synnott-D’Annibaler, can say you have to try a certain blush because she’s tried 50 different blushes, and this is the best color for this season. And also, look how beautiful it looks on Julia Roberts! Are you moving in a direction of celebrifying your editors? We’re introducing our editors into our pages, but this has never been a brand that creates a cult of personality around any one editor, whether it’s myself or someone else. Where does the service element come into play? We know what our readers want, almost up to the point of over-delivering. Our September issue is 652 pages! It’s a good hour and a half flip through, at least. We don’t skimp on information or inspiration. I consider us successful if our reader does or shares something. Does your newsstand success give you a cushion editorially? I always know why we’re successful, but I don’t take any of it for granted. The first time we regained number one in advertising and were number one on the newsstand that year, I told our team there are shades of number one. We can be more number one! We cannot become complacent. Plus, anyone who’s not at number one is looking at number one and thinking what piece of it they can adopt and make their own. How do you deal with that? We have to defend it, while also continuing to grow. The temptation is to look back and see how people are copying or poaching from us. That’s about being flattered and thinking you just have to stay one step ahead: It’s a recipe for disaster! We don’t think of ourselves as winning more than once or twice a year, FA S H I O N W E E K D A I L Y. C O M
when the numbers come out. Being number one is great, but if you start to disrespect the audience and your relationship with the reader, there are too many reasons for her to go away. It’s like a relationship: You have to keep working on it. What gets poached the most, though? You see a lot of magazines trying to change their spots. Some brands are trying to be something that they’re not, and instead are trying be a piece of InStyle: All of a sudden embracing approachability and accessibility or over-relying on celebrity as an access point. If that’s not inherent to the DNA of your brand, it rings inauthentic. Does that happen more in women’s general interest titles or fashion rags? I used to see it more in fashion titles, but now it’s happening in all magazines. I have a very myopic view; I can sit here and say that something just looks like an InStyle page. Even advertisers tell us that other magazines will come to them with their InStyle-esque pages. But those magazines will never have our authentic through-line: this is who we are, and who we’ve always been. Have you ever consider tweaking that tried-andtrue formula? There is a temptation, but we’ll quickly snap back. Even the slightest change feels like a big one for us because we know our approach so well. Sometimes we wonder if we want to be a little more cheeky. Or we’ll think, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to take the piss out of something or someone?’ Yes, but not at InStyle. It could be fun to do fashion shoots where it’s completely atmospheric and you can’t see the clothes. But ultimately, that’s not what an InStyle fashion image is about. We don’t shoot models; we shoot celebrities. I’m sure there are times when the photographers we work with would have loved to shoot a model instead of a celebrity! What’s been trickier to integrate into the edit mix? Street style! How do we wrest the growing power of the blogs and street-style scene and incorporate it in the magazine and own it? The proliferation of street-style bloggers worried us: What was their role? What was their credibility? So what was your solution? We asked the reader how she was using the magazine, and we were inundated with pictures of people trying new outfits or testing out a new eyeshadow. Now, we run two pages in print called ‘Inspired by InStyle,’ which is our version of street style. Who is tackling digital and print with equal aplomb? Esquire is doing a great job with both. They’re on the vanguard of digital, but they also make sure the print experience is fun and lively with good delivery as well as content. Has your competitive space shifted at all? Since we’re number one in every metric, people get confused about who our competition is. From a circulation standpoint it’s one thing; from an advertising standpoint, it’s another. Over the past year, I’ve focused on competitors in other spaces; if you decide to pick up another magazine instead of InStyle, that’s one thing. If you decide to pick up your phone instead of InStyle, that’s something entirely different! So what’s your expansion plan? We’re figuring out how we can keep building on the InStyle name. I don’t think you’ll be seeing an InStyle slot machine anytime soon, though. When you have a beloved brand and the consumer wants more of it, you have to figure out how to do that right. i n s e t s : c o u r t e sy