when cond? nast launched its new mid-market glossy magazine, Glamour, in March, the omens could not have been worse. Only a few weeks before, the new ABC figures revealed the women's magazine market to be in crisis, possibly the biggest it has faced in its 250-year history. The monthly glossies-that simultaneously derided and admired genre which manages to represent both the epitome of style and sophistication and the perceived lowest common denominator of sex and shopping-are facing a catastrophic decline in circulation. The latest ABC figures show Marie Claire down 11 per cent on the previous six months, with Woman's Journal an even more disastrous 14.8 per cent. Cosmopolitan, always apparently immune to market trends, was forced to swallow a 2 per cent loss.
Meanwhile, the weeklies-the ones with "Woman" in their title-are doing even worse. As their provincial, working-class readers disappear (either because they die or because they no longer want to buy a magazine which defines them in such an unflattering way), the figures have gone into a decline from which not even the fanciest knitting pattern can rescue them.
At first sight these magazines appear a disparate bunch, united only by their failure to shift copies. Marie Claire's current fashion pages feature a jacket by Yves Saint Laurent which costs ?855 and a corset from Gucci at ?1,480. The March issue of Cosmopolitan promises that you can "get a tighter, tinier, toned body in just 21 days," and offers a quiz to determine "are you caught in the kindness trap?" And then there is Woman's Own, which features a woman who can tell your fortune by looking at your bottom, and from where agony aunt Vanessa Feltz responds to a worried 50-year-old man whose lady friend prefers her 72-year-old dancing partner.
While the assumed audience varies wildly, the modus operandi of all these magazines is exactly the same. They aim to address every aspect of their reader's life, from what she eats, to how she dresses, to where she likes to go at night and with whom. Thus this month's New Woman deals with a query from one reader who wonders what interest-free credit means, and whether she should use it to buy a new sofa. Marie Claire sends a reader out on a blind date with a man chosen by the magazine (Max Lowry, "PR by day, musician by night") and asks her to report back. The weekly titles, meanwhile, seek the same kind of interaction in a more homely register. Readers of Woman contribute funny things their grandchildren have said to a slot called "Coffee Time" while being told, a few pages earlier, that the Co-op's roast potatoes are better than Tesco's.
By conspicuously catering to every aspect of life, these magazines provide the reader with a ready-made, if temporary, identity. In browsing Cosmopolitan you become, at least for an hour so, a Cosmo woman, complete with Cosmo tastes in men, curtains, books and career ambitions. While reading is always a solitary act, reading a traditional woman's magazine draws you into a community of like-minded people. Flipping through New Woman on the bus, at home, or during your lunch hour in a job that doesn't suit you, pulls you out of your physical and emotional isolation and into an extended conversation with virtual friends. You may be feeling frightened in a GP's surgery, but skimming through Woman's Own puts you in touch with the rest of your life (the non-ill part) as well as with those hundreds of thousands of other women who, it's possible to imagine, understand what you're going through.
It was precisely out of this need to create an imagined community of readers that women's magazines developed in the first place. In 1852 Samuel Beeton, husband of the more famous Isabella, launched the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, pioneering the mix of cookery, fashion and fiction that any reader of Woman's Own or Take A Break would recognise today. Particularly noticeable was the emphatic way in which the magazine constructed its reader as a middle-class woman keen to know the best way to manage her garden, her kitchen, her pets and her budget. To underscore this identity, letters were printed from readers anxious to share favourite tips or to contribute to a more general discussion on household matters. Meanwhile, "Cupid's Postbag" allowed space for expressing all those enduring complaints against men-their scarcity, untidiness and unwillingness to commit-which still pepper the problem pages today.
The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine flourished (within ten years it was selling a staggering-for then-50,000 copies a month) precisely because it provided its readers with a clear identity at a time when they were not entirely sure who they were. This was the first generation of middle-class women who didn't work in their fathers' or husbands' business. Instead they drew their sense of self from an entirely new role, that of full-time housewife. Likely to be living at a distance from mothers and sisters, the new urban middle-class woman needed a guidebook which described what "her sort of woman" ought to be doing (with carpets, tomatoes, neighbours and hemlines) while simultaneously making her feel that there were thousands of others just like her.
It's for that reason too that magazines like Woman's Journal, Marie Claire and Woman's Own did so well right up to the 1990s. With female identity in a state of flux, played out against a backdrop of changing socio-economic circumstances, women reached for magazines which told them who they were, or who they might be, in any particular incarnation. The sexually liberated woman of the 1970s turned into the career girl of the 1980s followed by the downshifter of the 1990s and each time she made a change, there was a magazine to reflect her back to herself.
The recognition that a fixed identity is never possible (we are quite capable of being career girls, downshifters and sexually liberated women all in one moment), combined with the confident realisation that it probably doesn't matter anyway, means that women no longer need to read magazines which tell them who they are. Indeed, having to read about a projected lifestyle that has nothing to do with your own is tedious.
It is no surprise, then, that the statistics show women failing to buy general magazines and turning to niche publications instead. The big successes in the ABC July-December figures were OK! and Hello! (who take turns to lead the market) and Heat, which saw an extraordinary rise of 137.6 per cent on the last six months. None of these magazines attempt to define the reader, or even to speak to her directly. There is no editor's letter, problem page, or features suggesting how she should run her sex life or her kitchen. She could be 16 or 60, might have a husband, a horse, a drug habit or a small fortune. The only thing that can be said about her-and about the other half a million readers-is that she has an insatiable appetite for reading about the goings-on of people more famous than herself.
Confident in their core identity, women buy niche publications to answer specific interests (house, design, health and beauty titles are all proliferating and the best ones do well). Ironically, it is men who seem to be sticking with the general interest titles. Twenty years ago, it was received wisdom in the magazine industry that British men would never buy general titles. Secure in their own individuality, so the theory went, they reached for reading matter to match their particular interests, be it motorbikes, porn, or high finance. And yet... the 1990s saw the triumph of titles like GQ, Loaded and FHM which presented men with a complete view of who they might be, from the cars they drove to the women they slept with (or wished they did). The men's market remains buoyant (FHM's sales are up 2 per cent-so much for the end of new laddism), and gives every sign of staying that way, unlike its more sickly sister. In these post-feminist times, it is men who need a monthly fix of text and image to tell them who they are meant to be.
