“The Devil Wears Prada” showed us more or less how the backstage of a fashion magazine works. Whether you want to pursue a career in this area of the fashion business or for personal knowledge – because even though you work in another department or are starting your own fashion brand you need to know all the dynamics of the fashion industry – in this article you will discover the whole fashion media cycle and how garments go from fashion shows to fashion magazine covers, how publishers and editors make their choices, what’s the book they propose to the editor in chief and more.
About defining fashion trends
Fashion editors work closely with designers and retailers to highlight trends their readers would find interesting. Of the thousands of new collections released each season, each media outlet must sort and sift to find those looks that speak to their audience, and then create photo layouts for the publication.
Every season they collectively go through all of the runway shows from New York, London, Milan and Paris and pull through actual looks that they think will work for future stories at fashion magazines.
About choosing the pieces to feature on the magazine
Once the editors have identified the trend for the season, they then go through all of their market images, which are the photos that they’ve taken at all the appointments, and they pull out kind of the lower end market, and the more affordable pieces that they think that the readers want to see on the page that still relates to the bigger trends of the season.
From there, the editors compile a book (fashion editors meet with new and affirmed designers and figure out how they can incorporate their looks and items into the book ) that they present to the editor in chief, and the creative director, and they go over every single trend, what stylist we think might like that trend, what photographer would work well with it, and we send them out to all the stylists and photographers that the magazine work with regularly. Then stylists and photographers send back their feedback and some inspiration images that they would want to incorporate for a future shoot for the magazine.
About getting the pieces
Shoots are really important and fashion magazines want to create the best shoots that are aspirational so that the readers want to buy into the product. As shoots are confirmed, fashion editors work with stylists to call in the best pieces in the market that they think will work for the story that they’re doing.
Once everything is at the fashion magazine HQ and it’s laid out and organized on racks and on the tables, the team edit through to what they think are the best of the best pieces that they want to show the stylist and the editor in chief. They go through everything and the editor in chief picks out her/his favorite pieces and the stylist goes through the looks they have created, and the editors kind of talk over the shoot before it actually happens.
