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Whether it’s fate or the result of meticulous forethought, September has become synonymous with influence, change and reinvention. In high fashion’s “size zero” universe, the fall collections routinely set the tone, with their rococo twitterings seamlessly segueing into the new year. As designers, photographers, models and artists articulate their vision of the season through big-bucks advertising campaigns, the ninth month is routinely the busiest and most lucrative in the fashion magazine cycle. Any mag hag worth his or her subscription will tell you that the industry’s shorthand for “make or break” is made up of three other words: “the September issue.”

Long regarded as a category barometer, American Vogue has been producing brick-like September issues for most of this decade. In 2005, the media gossip site Gawker produced a commemorative T-shirt that read “Beat me with ten pounds of Vogue,” a backhanded acknowledgement that Condé Nast’s flagship title had become too hefty to ignore.

The Mighty Month

Two years later, at the height of the luxury boom, the magazine marked a high point in its fortunes with an 840-page-thick September edition. How that came together — focusing, of course, on Anna Wintour, its famously aloof editor-in-chief — is the subject of a documentary creatively called The September Issue.

But thanks to an uncertain economic climate, core luxury advertisers have had to scale back on their placements, forcing the world’s leading fashion and beauty titles to work double-time to fill up their pages. Across the board, the big rags are staring at a different set of numbers. As Mediaweek’s Lucia Moses reports, “With 427 ad pages in its September issue, Condé Nast’s Vogue will carry the most ad pages of its competitors in the beauty/fashion set. But that triumph is offset by the fact that that figure represents a decline of 36.7 percent versus the year ago.” (It may be September in the real world, but magazine editors and publishers, always working at least two months ahead, are already close to completing their holiday offerings.)

Perhaps more humbling is the fact that, for the first time in its 24-year history, American Vogue’s greatest rival, Elle, “banked more ad pages in the first half of the year,” according to the Financial Times’ Peter Aspden. Suddenly, September isn’t the mighty month it used to be.  

Changing Habits

It appears that advertisers are not the only ones changing their habits. Since budgets are all but gone by the time January and February roll around, editions during these months are normally the year’s thinnest and most underwhelming, both content- and ad-wise. To remedy the situation, editors have had to turn to time-tested saviors: celebrities. Media blog Showbiz Spy claims that a nearly-naked Jennifer Aniston helped shift a whopping 330,000 copies of GQ’s January edition, while Robert Pattinson’s March issue sold an impressive 300,000 copies. The men’s magazine is the only title to experience sales growth so far in 2009.

In the Philippines, the leading magazine companies — Summit, MMPI, and ABS-CBN — also recognize that celebrities are newsstand sellers. Reflecting the overall state of the publishing industry, actresses double as cover girls and steal, so to speak, work meant for models; trained mannequins are then sadly relegated to the inside pages. In order to survive, some magazines flirt with different ways of doing business, including selling covers to premium advertisers.

The Present Media Landscape

Instead of sounding the death knell for yet another medium, observers, including myself, are seeing a gradual but nonetheless radical shift in how publishers should create, launch and run their magazines. As the ad-centered business model is no longer failsafe, titles that were simply invented to solve the needs of media buyers are doomed to extinction. Those who are trained in the needs of a specific and interested readership, however, will probably thrive — and maybe even become successful — in the present media landscape.

Magazine editors are supposed to be professionally sensitive to nuance, but from the looks of it, those at American Vogue are woefully out of touch with reality. Readers skeptical of Vogue’s current relevance continue to point out a litany of redundant hat tricks: improperly airbrushed covers, uninspired editorials, and scant content. It’s ironic that the very thing it used to publicly boast has whittled down Vogue’s quality and credibility, turning it into a mere catalogue of shiny ads for the month of September.

Showing cracks in her icy veneer, Anna Wintour recently appeared Late Show with David Letterman to promote both The September Issue and Fashion’s Night Out, Vogue and the City of New York’s vain attempt to kick off fall fashion week and stimulate the economy. If you’re an optimist, you could see this gesture as a sign that the English editrix has temporarily decoupled from her trademark mystery. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be wrong to think that her last-minute charm offensive was a requiem for a decadent, obsolete era.

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