"Shop in your own closet!"

As the economy lurches, glossy magazines scramble to downsize a luxury-living message for an anxious readership.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Magazines, Media, Vogue, Economy, Recession, Rebecca Traister, Life

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Jan. 15, 2009 | These are bleak days for the economy, and bleaker days for the magazine industry. As plummeting advertising saps glossy pages, freelance budgets and jobs, many magazines are frantically trying to stay alive. But doing so requires an unenviable high-wire act: how to hold on to their high-end advertisers, remain fun and diverting and escapist, and yet not alienate readers whose own wallets have become as emaciated as the January issue of Vogue.

Despite decades of premature bell-tolling about the death of print, turn-of-the-21st-century magazines were, in many ways, plump geese, fattened on big advertising budgets, a seemingly limitless market and an expanding class of consumers eager to spend money on expensive things (whether they could afford them or not). Americans wanted to eat well, dress fine and live lavishly, and that was good for food and shelter and fashion magazines. Americans wanted to wallow in celebrity gossip, and a passel of glossy weeklies was born, delivering Hollywood gossip in photo-larded installments. The pesky divide between editorial and advertising melted with the development of magalogs, publications like Lucky and Domino devoted entirely to introducing readers to stuff they might want to buy.

So how does an industry built on a meringue of material aspiration adjust to the fast-deflating circumstances of its readers, most of whom are trying to adapt to the new realities of shrunken 401Ks, foreclosed houses and lost jobs? Can magazines that just months ago were advising people about which eyeball-janglingly expensive luxury cruise to go on, or which multimillion-dollar townhouse to buy, or which Alberta Ferretti dress to covet, suddenly begin preaching thrift? Do they soldier blindly forward, providing economically depressed readers with the printed equivalent of Busby Berkeley movies and the Ziegfeld Follies? Do they break the bad news swiftly, advising readers on how to rearrange their lives? Or do they gingerly attempt a journalistic triple axel: simultaneously delivering dank reality, aspirational fantasy and useful analysis of what it all means?

If the bunch of magazines sitting on newsstands this January is any indication, the initial acrobatics are going to be ... awkward.

Elle's February issue takes one of the most direct stabs at the situation, beginning with Roberta Myers' editor's letter, headlined "Style-O-Nomics," in which she openly frets that while "we in Fashionland fixate on what to tell our readers to buy in a down economy, more pointed questions about the role and even necessity of fashion come back at us daily." Myers goes on to argue that it wouldn't kill a "crazy smart" financial reporter she'd seen on television to buy a decent blouse, and touts the issue's focus on outfits to be found for under $50 at Topshop, JCPenney and H&M. These bargain items do exist ("cropped pants, New York & Company, $33") in the fashion spreads at the end of the magazine, pages away from more typically luxe items like "patent leather open-toe shoe with black socks attached, Proenza Schouler, $1,815." That's right. Socks attached.

Meanwhile, January's Vogue, with Anne Hathaway on the cover, did not give any hint that the magazine was even considering how to address a new economy. Its features included a first-person essay by Lori Campbell, a hard-charging advertising executive who used to be embarrassed by her mother's choice to live off the grid in Hawaii and maintain a cost of living of around $5,000 (though she was unembarrassed to admit that, for her, that figure "translates to something a bit smaller, like a Bottega Veneta bag.") Campbell writes of how her mother's eco-conscious lifestyle was once considered "cheap and poor," but now that it's called "green and fashionable" she's come to see its value. And that's before we even get to the feature about the couple of art collectors who were forced to buy a (tacky, with all its wine cellars and bowling alleys) spec house in Montauk because they just couldn't find an appropriate parcel of land on a bluff overlooking the sea.

But judging by its just-released February issue, Vogue seems to have taken a cold shower and pulled itself together. Its February cover bears a top banner reading "Simple Luxuries: Balancing Your Clothing and Beauty Budgets," and its cover story, about Blake Lively, the flaxen young star of "Gossip Girl," television's paean to flaxen young excess, opens with a scene in which the actress is filming her show on a Manhattan street: "The lens cropped the Upper East Side down to its most stately and prosperous lines, with no trace of the glaring retail space available signs and going out of business sale posters one block away, signals that the worldwide recession is lapping at the edges of Manhattan's most privileged ZIP codes." The article goes on to call the show, the character played by Lively, and "Gossip Girl's" vision of New York City itself "dazzling and worldly and optimistic -- if, indeed, a bit preposterous." Lively explains that in these days of harsher economic realities, her prime time confection is "just an escape, watching these sparkly lives."

Sort of like the magazine in which she is featured. Looking at couture clothing on shiny, perfume-scented pages has always been an escapist and unrealistic pursuit. Even in more prosperous times, for the vast majority of readers of fashion rags, pawing through pages of pictures of wait-listed handbags and "architectural shoes" has always been pure fantasy, not akin to shopping in a catalog.

But shopping is exactly the activity on which magalogs like Lucky are built. Which means it needs to adjust -- and fast. Lucky's February issue bears headlines like "624 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Look" and "Super Affordable Glamour: Look Polished No Matter What Your Budget." In her editor's letter, Kim France writes, "We're all hunting for a good deal these days, but the fact of something being delightfully less than pricey isn't enough anymore. To be defined as a truly outstanding score, it's also got to be something we'll go to again and again."

This fits with the fashion industry's new agitprop vocabulary, as hilariously explored in a recent piece in London's Guardian. Items of expensive clothing are now "investment pieces," purported bargain shoppers are called "recessionistas," and magazines tout "crisis chic" looks and congratulate stylish women who have downsized their handbag collections. And then there's "shopping in your closet," a recession-era trend touted by magazines like Harper's Bazaar and on the cover of January's Glamour, which heralded "100 Perfect Outfits That Are Already in Your Closet."

This is very practical advice. It is very sturdy. It is very sage. It is very depressing. As someone who kind of loathes shopping, I nonetheless am horrified by the idea. No one should shop in their own closet unless they are rich and their closet is huge, in which case, they can probably still afford to shop outside their closet anyway. For the rest of us, this is just a fancy way of saying, "Wear the same clothes you've been wearing for the past 10 years." I admire the sentiment, but it's precisely this kind of workmanlike thrift that could suck all the joy out of magazine reading.

Next page: New York magazine, like an upbeat friend who has suddenly gone off her meds