February 25, 2010
Magazine of the week: Elle Collections
Elle Collections is the biannual fashion special from UK Elle, and the new issue published earlier this month has been given a complete overhaul by the Elle team. What a lovely job they’ve done.
The theme of my current Creative Review column – unfortunately unavailable online – is how magazines influence each other, and in particular how ideas cross from independents to the mainstream. This recent magazine is a perfect example of the mainstream paying attention to smaller titles. That’s not intended as negative criticism. Ideas bounce around in magazine-land, it’s what you make of them that counts. It’s easy to identify influences here (New York, Look, Purple...), but those are great sources, and the end result is greater than the sum of the various parts.
The main edition of Elle has been getting lots of attention recently – it’s become one of those must-mention magazines – and this spin-off takes the raw materials of the monthly and successfully adapts them to the more rarified and specialised fashion environment. It’s a tried and tested formula – I’m thinking of GQ Style and Arena Homme Plus – aimed at 1) reinforcing the parent magazine’s fashion creds while 2) banking a fortune in advertising cash.
To achieve this, Collections siezes the magazine-y feel beloved of independents but so rarely used by the mainstream. In a small but significant step, there’s a 16-page section on uncoated matt stock that uses small multiple images (above) to bring to life the shows in New York, London, Milan and Paris. This is the behind the scenes minutae – the invitations, the sets, the numbers. And it’s printed on a slightly smaller page size:
There are a couple of other 16-pages on the same uncoated paper but not cropped (for text pieces, above), then the rest of the magazine is printed on fashion’s favourite gloss stock. Throughout all these sections, the typography is highly restrained – with the exception of the section numbers (below) nothing larger than 24pt I reckon.
Lovely to see caption information included as part of the page design rather than consigned to the edges as in most fashion magazines. Usually this is avoided for fear of spoiling the pictures, but these combinations of still lives and catwalk shots benefit from the subtle type and resulting white space around the page.
Finally, there are pages and pages of catwalk pictures that are really simple and very effective. I’m sure it’s been seen before, but not on this scale – there are nine spreads of favourite shows (above) and four spreads looking at colour (below).
One of the challenges a full-out fashion title like this faces is to make the editorial content stand out from the super-hyped advertising. Elle Collections succeeds by being confident, subtle and creating a calm visual identity that doesn’t try to fight the ads.
24 Comments
Comment on February 25, 2010 by mat says:
Looks lovely and classy.
Comment on February 25, 2010 by Rebecca says:
its flipping great this. i bought two copies which is really really rare for me. im not thatbothered about the main Elle magazine despite all your nice words about it, its OK, but this is a beautiful beautiful thing. full of restraint and class.
Comment on February 25, 2010 by peterson says:
That looks fantastic, love the detail. Thanks for the preview.
Comment on February 25, 2010 by Woz says:
Huh? Shouldn’t it be called ‘Fantastic Man’s Elle Collections’? (Plot, (paper) stock and two smoking (barrel) jackets?)
There is inspiration… and then there is theft.
It’s good such an avant-garde (for what FM did initially) magazine is appropriated in such a way and (re)presented to the mainstream – is that post-garde? er… hmmmm Fredric Jameson may have already solved this labeling dilemma – but jeez… YOU ARE REPRESENTING FASHION. BE ORGINAL.
Comment on February 25, 2010 by Woz says:
Huh? Shouldn’t it be called ‘Fantastic Man’s Elle Collections’? (Plot, (paper) stock and two smoking (barrel) jackets?)
There is inspiration… and then there is theft.
It’s good such an avant-garde (for what FM did initially) magazine is appropriated in such a way and (re)presented to the mainstream – is that post-garde? er… hmmmm Fredric Jameson may have already solved this labeling dilemma – but jeez… YOU ARE REPRESENTING FASHION. BE ORIGINAL.
Comment on February 25, 2010 by Woz says:
Oh, and the obvious overtones of all the tearsheets they pin on the walls from New York magazine (as iD’d by MagCulture in the review).
But sorry, this end result is far below the sum of its varying (inspirational/stolen) parts – NY, Purple, Fan Man, MABT? All vastly superior (while accepting they don’t have to carry the large commercial attentions of a title such a Elle Coll – uh, sounds like a disease).
It’s good. But not /that/ good.
Comment on February 26, 2010 by Andrew says:
This magazine looks/nothing/like Fantastic Man or Purple or MABT. And is a lot better in places than most of those titles mentioned. Best mag I have seen in 10 years. And I dont like much.
Comment on February 26, 2010 by Mark says:
Charming
Comment on February 26, 2010 by pete says:
Woz you grumpy so* and so, FM is in many ways a homage to old things anyway.
Fantastic Man still has ads and editorials, it wasn’t some performance artists in a shed in the north pole.
Fantastic Man’s star writer used to be Heat’s star writer – to me FM was never about radicalism, but about rigour and conviction and application; they are some of the few fashion people who give enough of a fig about words to proof them properly, for example, just because of an awareness of the value of an old-fashioned, authoritative, proper feel to a page. It was an object lessing in doing something straightforward simply and well and dressing it up as something new and different.
(I haven’t seen Fantastic Woman yet but from the preview I was actually thinking I liked the type and style of Elle Collections more.)
Franks made special mention of Elle Collections flying out the joint in one of their recent mailouts.
Comment on February 26, 2010 by pete says:
Not Fantastic Woman, Gentlewoman.
Which I’m sure will have good stuff in, Penny Martin is top, but to illustrate my point about your point about avant garde v mainstream, chickens and eggs, etc check out v1 of Gentlewoman, which IIRC gets its launch in Paris next week:
http://magculture.com/blog/?p=4434
And then look at the type etc on the new French Connection ads, which are out now:
http://www.frenchconnection.com/category/woman/woman.htm
A weird thing re:
Comment on February 26, 2010 by Woz says:
You know I’m always grumpy Pete ;-)
Don’t get me wrong – I have a copy of Elle Coll right on my desk and I think it’s a very good and well-realised production. I was simply decrying what I see as the too-close-for-comfort influences from contemporary times. Mine a little deeper.
I agree with what you say about FM – the writing has never ever been top-notch in it, but it was all about the /conviction/ as you say (but never about the proofing as you mentioned – far too many inaccuracies and typos in early editions!). That’s what a great great magazine extends itself as – passion and conviction for the subject, typos or not.
Andrew – I don’t see how you can claim this looks nothing like FM (paper stock, type) or MABT, NY (type, furniture, detailing). But the best mag of the last 10 years? Surely that has to be Nuts?
Comment on February 26, 2010 by mat says:
Fantastic man is fantastic. But it didn’t invent anything, it used a style and applied it.
So Elle has decided to also use it. That is how fashions work. Surely on the whole it’s about the quality of the work produced and the appreciation of the detail. If we had to be the first to do anything to make it worth while nothing would ever get done.
Comment on February 26, 2010 by Andrew says:
Arena Homme Plus was a rip off of Vogue Homme, Pop is its own version of The Face. To imply Purple isnt inspired by anything or anyone is naive. Man about was slated for being a rip off of Fantastic Man – by the eds of FM themselves no less – but now has found it own feet.
Nobody else has really done a magazine like this – the shelves are full of Collections books with no content at all. I really think its inspired.
Comment on February 26, 2010 by Rebecca says:
i agree andrew. woz i think you speak many words of wisdom but on this your off the mark
Comment on February 28, 2010 by Marc says:
I think this is great. Usually I don’t care much for these fashion bibles, with their endless photo-shoots and wide columns of dull, un-penetrable copy about people you’ve never heard of. Their attitude usually seems to be that they’re too cool to be bothered with actually spending time thinking about the overall look and feel. This looks to have been given a lot more thought though, and the attention to detail looks fantastic. I’d love to get hold of a copy – tricky to find one in New Zealand I’d imagine…
Comment on February 28, 2010 by jeremy says:
Try MagNation?
http://www.magnation.com/index.php?do=storeLocation
Comment on February 28, 2010 by andy smith says:
Just picked up a copy and I think it looks really good, just glad I didn’t have to do all the cutouts…
Comment on March 1, 2010 by mat says:
Who ever did the cutouts should get an adobe clipping path award.
Comment on March 1, 2010 by Woz says:
So many places now, even external repro houses, send away cutouts to India and Phillipines for overnight turnaround. Clipping paths to enlightenment!
Comment on March 7, 2010 by Don says:
Woz, I guarantee you chuckled to yourself when coming up with “Clipping paths to enlightenment!”. Their re:pro house is in London. Back to the mag, I like how the cutout pages are functional, classy and so simple — far better than any VOGUE Collections! Other new favourite is the “News” section, filled with lots of fun little nuggets as well as lengthy articles- a cool extra.
Comment on June 13, 2010 by maru says:
do you know how much is it? and where can i buy it? i’m going to london in august and i would like to have it!
Comment on June 13, 2010 by jeremy says:
It costs six pounds and was available in most decent newsagents, but it’s been out a while so may be hard to track down now.http://magculture.com/blog/wp-admin/edit-comments.php?p=5613&approved=1#comments-form
Comment on August 12, 2010 by Serçois Bernal says:
Great !)
Fantastic
I <3 Elle
Comment on August 23, 2010 by Abo Vergleich says:
Wow, looks fantastic!
Does anybody know, if Elle Collections or something similar is available in other countries? (Germany in particular)
