The cult of celebrity style - ninety-one percent of the readers of Time Inc.'s 'InStyle' celebrity lifestyle magazine are women - Brief Article

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, July 1, 1994

Think of Time Inc. magazines and you probably think of newsweekly, finance, sports and personality magazines. But beauty and fashion? Those are more likely to call to mind the Conde Nast and Hearst titles. Not anymore. Less than a year after the company launched its test issue of InStyle, a celebrity lifestyle book, comes the first official copy of this clearly very women-oriented celebrity title. Publisher Ann Jackson says test results show that 91 percent of the readers are female. Granted, Martha Stewart Living, Parenting and the Southern Progress Corp. magazines, including Southern Living, Southern Accents and Cooking Light, do target women, but this is the first fullfledged, in-house Time Inc.-conceived-and-executed title for the distaff side.

Jackson says the company didn't initially set out to create the magazine for women. "We didn't have a clear image of the audience we were going after, but the fact that it is mostly women doesn't surprise us," she explains. The June issue, which features Barbra Streisand on the cover, has greatly increased fashion coverage compared to the test issue. Celebrities sport various styles at weddings and parties. Competitive with the women's fashion magazines like Harper's Bazaar and Elle, InStyle is also up against Vanity Fair and People Weekly. These are dual-audience celebrity magazines that skew toward the female reader (65 percent of People's readers are women), but they also share Instyle's reader demographics (a 34-year-old college-educated female with a household income of $50,000).

How will Time Inc.'s newcomer fare in the cutthroat fashion-and-beauty, advertising market? Very well, thank you,. predicts Jackson. "We are bringing'a fresh audience that isn't saturated. Time Inc. has a very happy history of launching new genres. It was the first in news, sports and personality journalism. Now it's creating the celebrity lifestyle genre."