In an age where everyone is mourning the demise of print publications, hysterically clutching to books and magazines as if their supposed expiry date would make them vanish, it’s not often that a publication will announce a foray in to print. Making an app or a digital subscription, sure, but starting up a print publication, of pushing out tangible pages rather than digital ones, is pretty much the highest risk-move an editor could make.
Bucking (and setting) the trend is Vogue Australia, who have today announced that their recently launched online platform, Miss Vogue, will be receiving a reincarnation in print form, because you can’t really tear out glamorous double page spreads to stick to your wall from your iPad, can you? Miss Vogue will be edited by the former Oyster editor Alice Cavanagh, steering the helm for its 20-something targeted audience, while also overseeing the app that will accompany the inevitably lush pages of Miss Vogue. Who said print and digital can’t be friends?
Delivered in a “matte covered collector’s edition with defined art direction”, Vogue seems to be leading a movement that recognises the struggles of print by integrating a multiplatform presence, while highlighting the essence of print as being a tangible product with weighty pages that could never truly be mimicked online—arguing that print can be luxury: something worth paying for.
If Miss Vogue‘s print edition, available on September 2, follows the steps its online presence has set out, it looks like targeting a younger audience means that the magazine won’t present page after immaculate page of haute couture, as if to pretend that, “hey, look at all the money you (don’t) have” serving up a welcome dose of realism by promoting mid-range products that may well suit the budget of the Starving Student variety.
What started out as a blog has now turned in to a fully fledged print medium, Miss Vogue heralds a positive recipe for success. If your blog is hella magazine worthy, best you enter Pedestrian’s Blogsters awards here.
