Latest mags help you style body and home

As our tweed pumps walk us deeper into this fall’s fashion season, a handful of new magazines are angling to be more than trendy what-to-wear guides.

Shop Etc., from Hearst Magazines, launched in August to help career women in their 30s keep up with the latest in clothing, beauty and home decor in a Lucky-meets-Harper’s Bazaar way.

Aimed at black women, Suede, from Essence Communications, debuted in September, pairing the haute-couture tidbits of Vogue with the celebrity sightings of InStyle.

Meanwhile, Conde Nast is planning a shopping magazine for home-decor products – think Cargo meets Martha Stewart Living. And the folks at Us Weekly are looking into a fashion magazine that tells us “exactly where the celebs shop.”

Their editors see these new glossies as hybrids of today’s most popular magazines, emphasizing fashion and lifestyle. This, they say, is a time of Internet shopping, immediate gratification, and “aha!” moments.

The hope is that these thicker, photo-heavy offerings will lure readers with fantasy and glitz – and also attract such nontraditional fashion-mag advertisers as auto and housewares makers.

“You are seeing this kind of cross-pollination in magazine publishing everywhere,” said Steven Cohn, editor in chief of the New York-based Media Industry Newsletter.

“Everybody has to make a buck out there. Brands are mixing with other brands to build up their cachet, and magazines are now forced to do the same thing to survive. It’s a fact of life in 2004 that wasn’t a decade ago, and certainly wasn’t a generation ago.”

Readers don’t just want to know what to wear, the logic goes – they want to learn how to have a glamorous life “and they want the facts in colorful, bite-sized chunks.” No more burying the details in tiny type on the back pages – not when a magazine might get no more eye-time than a woman can pack into a 30-minute elliptical-machine workout.

By starting new magazines instead of transforming existing ones (and abandoning articles altogether), publishers hope for the best of both worlds.

“When you look at the rise of a Lucky or Cargo, you definitely see the industry struggling to find a balance between editorial and sound bites,” said Patti Wolter, a professor of magazine journalism at Northwestern University.

“Consumers make choices at the newsstands, and there is a definite pressure for magazines that do long form to stay true to editorial values and still give readers what they want in terms of content.”

The founding editor of Shop Etc., Mandi Norwood, admits to trying to win the hearts of busy shopaholics like herself.

One recent morning during Spring 2005 Fashion Week, Norwood sat cross-legged in a sleek knee-length black jumper and crisp white T-shirt, nibbling bacon-and-egg hors d’oeuvres at a breakfast preview of Kate Spade’s spring purses.

The idea for Shop Etc. came to her two years ago, Norwood said, when she realized that these days most women could use a personal shopper.

So Shop Etc. is set up like a department store, with the table of contents referred to as a directory. The magazine is divided evenly into three sections: fashion, beauty and home.

Icons, like the ones you find online, point the way: lightbulbs

to good ideas, dollar signs to good buys and hearts to must-haves. Every month, the editors offer their top five picks in each category, from sources as far-

ranging as Neiman Marcus and Wal-Mart.

“People can live well whether they are on a budget or not,” she said. “We are providing them a service to show them how.”

Suede editor-in-chief Suzanne Boyd hopes her magazine will show how hip-hop style intertwines with high fashion. The 228-page premiere issue has a section called “Street Chic” that shows laced sandals as well as how designer John Galliano was influenced by the Rasta style in his Fall 2004 collection.

Like Shop Etc., Suede provides easy-to-spot where-to-buy information – such as in a feature that shows how to adapt tweed Chanel-type suits for church.

And like celebrity magazines, this publication aims to show us how the stars live.

“We don’t just want to show people how to get the lifestyle,” Boyd explained. “We want people to ‘see it,’ so we are a fashion magazine with elements of shopping. That’s our charge as magazines, to show how fashion meets lifestyle.”

At least until the next twist in the style-mag genre hits the scene.