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Abstract
By 1914 the leading British magazine publishers had successfully launched a range of popular weekly titles for female readers which focused on everyday women's fashions. In contrast, the British operations of American publishers Hearst and Condé Nast sought to develop high-quality magazines designed to attract affluent consumers – and the advertisers who sought to reach these readers. This paper argues that the success of Condé Nast's Vogue depended on two main factors: gaining authenticity in the world of high fashion and forming close relations with their customers – both readers and advertisers – using market research and promotion techniques transferred from the United States.
Acknowledgements
Our thanks go to the staff at the Condé Nast archive in New York, in particular to Shawn Waldron (Archive Director of Conde Nast Publications) and Florence Palomo (Research Librarian and Operations Manager); the staff at the History of Advertising Trust in Ravingham (particularly Chloe Veale); Dr Lesley Whitworth (Deputy Curator University of Brighton Design Archives, for her assistance with the Alison Settle Archive); the staff at University of Worcester Pierson Library; the Getty Images Archive; and we acknowledge the support of the Business and Labour History Group of the New Zealand Work and Labour Market Institute, AUT University, in securing the rights to reproduce images from LIFE magazine on our behalf. This research was supported by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust No. F/00 353/A.
Notes
1. Vogue promotion to advertisers, Official Handbook of the PPA, 1938–9, PPA Archive, History of Advertising Trust, Raveningham.
2. Summary of the Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories 1941 report and the speech made by Ernest Bevin, Minster for Labour and National Service on 22 July 1942. ‘The work of the factory department in Great Britain’ (1943).
3. Edward Lloyd had been the first British periodical publisher to install the pathbreaking American Hoe steam-driven rotary press in 1856. The stamp duty law demanded that every periodical smaller than a certain size, priced at less than sixpence, and issued more than once a month, must, if it contained news or comment on news, carry the 1d. newspaper stamp. The stamp was abolished in 1855.
4. The figure for the circulation of EDM in 1862 of 60,000 is cited by Altick (1998, pp. 394–395). This source provides estimated circulation data for other leading mainstream magazines, which peaked in the period 1855–58, as: Family Herald (300,000); London Journal (450,000); Cassell's Family Paper (285,000); Reynolds’ Miscellany (200,000).
5. On EDM see also Ballaster et al. (1991, pp. 86–93). Beeton's publishing business was brought down by the collapse of Overend Gurney in 1866.
6. Newnes used a 100-strong marching band of the local Boy's Brigade to promote the first issue of the Tit-Bits magazine in Manchester.
7. According to figures provided by Altick (1998, pp. 395–396), this circulation level of 200,000 placed Tit-Bits on a par with the highly popular Boy's Own Paper in terms of its weekly sales. However, by the second half of the 1890s Tit-Bits and its main competitors Answers and Pearson's Weekly were selling between 400,000 and 600,000 per issue, and sales of the latter title reputedly reached 1.25 million in 1897, becoming the first magazine to breach the million sales mark. Higher quality monthly magazines also boomed in the last few years of the nineteenth century. Newnes’ Strand Magazine sold 392,000 copies in July 1896, including 60,000 to USA, and the cheaper rival Harmsworth's Magazine and Royal Magazine (printed by Pearson) were selling 1 million copies around 1898.
8. Newnes had two periods in which he served as an MP, between 1885 and 1895 for Newmarket and between 1900 and 1910 for Swansea.
9. NA BT31/5097/34316. In 1897 his firm was reorganised with an increased nominal capital value of £1 million.
10. Cyril Arthur Pearson had originally worked for George Newnes and was the manager of The Strand Magazine before leaving to set up his own publishing empire founded on Pearson’s Weekly.
11. Around the period of the 1910s and 1920s Amalgamated Press made a determined effort to enhance the popularity of its women's magazines through the medium of paper dressmaking patterns. This feature of ladies’ magazines was already well established, dating back before the Beetons, but in 1908 one of the firm's managers, Leslie Clark, was given responsibility for making a serious bid to gain an increased share of this market on behalf of Amalgamated Press. Initially revamping an existing title, Fashions For All, Clark created a group of journals which provided the Harmsworth organisation with a dominant position in this market segment, with a dedicated production plant in London and a staff of around 100 engaged in the preparation of paper patterns. A contemporary biographer of the business in the early 1920s noted that ‘Up to twenty million patterns are circulated every year, and the Amalgamated Press may well claim, since it has originated some millions of styles, to have played a great part in dressing the British public’ (Dilnot, 1925, p. 36).
12. The merger of the firms of Newnes and Pearson began when they jointly purchased the old-established publishing business of Messrs. Leach during 1914 (see The Newspaper World, no. 919, 14 August 1915, p. 11).
13. Companies House, Mirror Group Holdings (00218062), G Series (G1: Annual Returns for 1927–49).
14. During this same period (1897–1907) the circulation of Collier's increased from 19,159 to 568,073.
15. On the significance of the dress pattern industry in the United States see Walsh (1979).
16. Munsey was one of a group of American publishers who in the early 1890s had hit upon a formula of elegant simplicity: identify a large audience that is not hereditarily affluent or elite, but that is getting on well enough, and that has cultural aspirations; give it what it wants; build a huge circulation; sell the magazine at a price below the cost of production, and make your profit on advertising.
17. Condé Nast's full manifesto for this strategy was published in the June 1913 edition of The Merchants and Manufacturers Journal, p. 12.
18. Harper's Bazar had one ‘a’ until 1929 when it launched the UK edition as ‘Bazaar’ and changed the American title in line with this (see Ashley, 2006, p. 272). Hearst purchased many of his magazine titles; both Cosmopolitan (1905) and Good Housekeeping (1911) were existing titles that Hearst acquired (see Peterson, 1956, pp. 200–203). Nast also acquired rather than started his leading magazines.
19. Ayer's Directory for 1910, for example, shows that both Strand Magazine and Pearson's Magazine were selling in New York (Ayer's Directory, 1910, p. 1086). The US edition of the Strand Magazine ran from January 1891 to February 1916. These were completely identical in terms of content to the UK edition until November 1895 (see Ashley, 2006, p. 207). In the 1890s it had been the growing import trade in American magazines to Britain, such as Harper's, Scribner's, the Atlantic Monthly and the Century, that had provided the stimulus for George Newnes to launch his monthly Strand Magazine in the first place (see Pound, 1966, p. 30).
20. The advertising market, key to Condé Nast's strategies, was weak in the French fashion industry, where private shows and exclusive relations with key customers was the dominant form of promotion.
21. Nast's appointment of the editor Dorothy Todd in 1923 moved British Vogue away from fashion towards literature, resulting in a decline in circulation, advertising and increasing losses. A new editor, Alison Settle, was appointed in 1926 and the editor-in-chief of the three Vogues, the formidable Edna Chase, spent time in London to ensure that Settle understood the commercial focus of Vogue. Yoxall set plans in motion to increase advertising revenue and effectively re-launch the magazine (Condé Nast, ‘British Vogue Formula’, unpublished internal report (1933), Condé Nast Archives Manuscripts Collections (CNAMC) New York, Box 14, Folder 7).
22. By way of comparison, the audited profits of Amalgamated Press for the year ending February 1932 was a little over £600,000. Mirror Group Holdings, UK Companies House Archive Records for Company Number 00218062.
23. A draft agreement specifies a 10-year contract, paying 6 guineas per page not including outside rights, 8 guineas per page including reproduction rights. The prices applied to a circulation of 30,000; above this for each additional 15,000 an extra 1 guinea would be paid to a maximum of 12 guineas, specifying a minimum 1100 guineas in year 1 and 1500 guineas in year 2. In addition Nast wanted photo studio work and editorial criticism (Iva Patcétch, letter ‘private 102’ to Condé Nast, 28 May 1935. CNAMC, Box 6, Folder 12).
24. [Unknown Author], ‘Staff members or regular contributors to Vogue who went to the Bazaar’, loose document, September 1933, CNAMC, Box 18, Folder 13.
25. Yoxall commented that negotiations with artistic talent were a constant problem, citing Cecil Beaton in particular. In a variety of correspondence it was clear Yoxall dreaded negotiating with key artists (Harry Yoxall, Private 278 to Condé Nast, 29 August 1941, CNAMC, Box 13, Folder 5).
26. Several of the key Parisian couturiers were not French, such as Schiaparelli (Italian), Mainbocher – a former editor of French Vogue – (American), Molyneux (English) and Balenciaga (Spanish).
27. The Arden Press was owned by WH Smith, and closed in 1937 before being bought and refitted by Lord Camrose as a reserve press for the Daily Telegraph (correspondence between Yoxall and Nast in July 1937, CNAMC, Box 12 Folder 19).
28. The Condé Nast archive materials contain many monthly detailed profit and loss reports on each edition of the magazine.
29. Greenfield and Reid point out, for example, that ‘Good Housekeeping magazine provided an index of “guaranteed adverts” to help readers’, which was not a feature of comparable British women’s magazines (1998, p. 168).
30. Selling at one shilling, Good Housekeeping introduced the new sub-category of the ‘service’ magazine into the women's market in Britain, and some issues of the magazine carried over 100 pages of advertising. The path-breaking nature of Good Housekeeping was further demonstrated in 1924 when the magazine opened the Good Housekeeping Institute, providing Britain with its first experience of consumer advice and protection (see Hilton, 2003, p. 172).
31. By the 1930s the New York department store Macy's alone was buying 100 copies every month. The importance of this market, not just for sales but in influencing fashion and becoming more important to advertising clients in the process, is emphasised in internal correspondence (William Davenport, letter ‘Private 129’ to Condé Nast, 13 May 1936, CNAMC, Box 1, Folder 3).
32. Harry Yoxall, letter to Condé Nast, 3 September 1929, CNAMC, Box 12, Folder 11).
33. Iva Patcévitch, letter to Walter Mass, 16 February 1933, CNAMC, Box 6, Folder 21). Seebohm notes that in the US a tacit quid pro quo existed between Vogue and its department stores and manufacturer advertisers, with editorial space being given to products and information. In 1943, for example, Seebohm (1982, p. 90) cites Saks Fifth Avenue spending $9180 for 9 pages and receiving 66 ½ pages of editorial space worth $67,830 in return.
34. From 1929 Vogue was publishing ‘double issues’ or ‘double-numbers’, two separate magazines tied together with string and sold jointly. Originally this was introduced by Yoxall in response to the idea of integrating the British Vogue Pattern Book into British Vogue, which he preferred to keep as a separate editorial entity (see Yoxall, 1966, p. 130). This strategy also allowed magazines which could not sustain their own circulation (such as the UK edition of House & Garden, closed in 1923 but recreated as a double in the Vogue House & Garden Book) to be appended to Vogue.
35. William Davenport, letter ‘Private 129’ to Condé Nast, 13 May 1936, CNAMC, Box 1, Folder 3).
36. Vogue, ‘What is the attitude of the upper class public toward’, survey report distributed to fashion retailers, 1936, CNAMC, Box 14, Folder 24. The survey covered attitudes towards contemporary furniture, the regency style, the department store versus the furnishing shop, remodelling old houses and the Vogue House & Garden Book. It is clear from Davenport's correspondence with Nast in 1936 that this survey was conceived wholly as bait for the retailers and had no editorial input or connection whatsoever.
37. The 1 March 1936 US Vogue carried 57 pages of manufacturers’ advertisements and 16 pages of retailers’. The comparable UK edition published 59 pages of manufacturers’ adverts and 47 pages of retailers’ (William Davenport, letter to Condé Nast, 6 March 1936, CNAMC, Box 2, Folder 1).
38. Chester Van Tassel, letter to Will Davenport, 11 November 1937, CNAMC, Box 12, Folder 20. In analysing the Harper's Bazaar selling strategy a review is given of the efforts undertaken to provide evidence that Vogue is able to reach its target demographic.
39. Chester Van Tassel, [letter to Will Davenport, 17 November 1937, CNAMC, Box 12, Folder 21.
40. William Davenport, letter ‘Private 51’ to Condé Nast, 19 January 1938, CNAMC, Box 2, Folder 6.
41. Condé Nast, letters to Edna Chase, 26 March and 11 May 1942, CNAMC, Box 1, Folder 21.
42. Condé Nast, letter to Richardson Wright, 12 March 1935, CNAMC, Box 12, Folder 2.
43. Mrs Morton, memo to Condé Nast, 10 March 1942, CNAMC, Box 18 Folder 21.
44. Condé Nast, ‘British Vogue Formula’, unpublished internal report 1933, CNAMC, Box 14, Folder 7.
45. Ibid.
46. Edna Chase, letter to Condé Nast, 25 August 1938, CNAMC, Box 1, Folder 24.