Women’s magazines: style on the loose?

here was a time, a sunken world that now seems almost fictional, when fashion magazines didn’t look like store windows. Where stylists went to shows without their iPhones, and snuck backstage with all their senses alert to approach the garment, taste the materials, appreciate the details. The era of the editor-editor, discoverer of new talent, free to love or hate a collection, and above all free to spread the word in the pages of her medium. The reign of Grace Coddington at Vogue, Diana Vreeland at Harper’s Bazaar, Frenchwomen Claude Brouet at Elle and Marie Claire, who “didn’t show what [she] found ugly”, and Marie-Claire Pauwels at Figaro Madame, who “respected [her] advertisers but didn’t [serve] them”. This was the heyday of creativity, of stylist/photographer tandems producing joyful, colorful images that bordered on the artistic for the covers of Vogue or L’Officiel.

Did the visionary, bold and free-spirited world of women’s magazines lose the battle at the turn of the century? Has freedom of tone deserted paper for the networks? Has the financialization of press groups swallowed up the nerve of these pygmalionesses with their sharp fashion instincts and unfettered audacity? Not so fast, say a handful of frondeurs, nostalgic for this rebellious fashion and freedom of expression and composition. Like L’Etiquette, a new kind of fashion magazine, a biannual advocating true freedom and a return to the full powers of the journalist in his kingdom, the press.