Magazines: The Fashion Beat

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With a "College Board" of some 1,500 girls who spend their spare time contributing news of campus fads and fashions, the fashion magazine Mademoiselle may well boast one of the largest unpaid reportorial staffs in the publishing world. The only reward for correspondents comes each spring, when 20 of the comeliest and most conscientious are entertained and photographed in New York and then packed off for a week's gaiety in Europe.

Mademoiselle's companion magazine Glamour also imports vacationing collegians to help promote the August college issue—though Glamour's girls are selected solely on the basis of their clothes and looks. Seventeen, which rounds off the trio of major young women's fashion magazines, organizes the teen-agers from a distance: it publishes their complaints, tips, yearnings, short stories and book reviews.

On the face of it, the magazines seem to be going out of their way to report the changing tastes of the clothes-conscious college girl. But what clothes do the girls choose? More often than not, they select what the magazines have already selected for them. The process is less the profession of journalism than it is the practice of marketing. "The fashion editor never puts a line on paper," says Barbara Kerr, the astute managing editor of Mademoiselle. "Sometimes she can scarcely read." Every editor has her beat (evening dress, lingerie, shoes), and she spends most of her time hobnobbing with manufacturers to discover new styles she thinks may catch on. Periodically, samples are piled up in a conference room and scrutinized. The editors mince no words as they cast baleful eyes on the goods: "Oh, no," "Ghastly," "How horrible." Often they suggest one less button or one more pleat. Eventually, they winnow out the styles that appeal to them; then go off to persuade manufacturers to make the changes and stores to stock the clothes. Since the merchandise cannot be shown in the magazine until the stores are lined up, the editors often become as aggressive as any Seventh Avenue salesman.

Cigar with Boots. While Vogue and Harper's Bazaar are still the sophisticated pacesetters in the adult fashion world, offering far-out styles at far-out prices, the three younger magazines appeal to an ever-growing group of less well heeled but just as clothes-conscious younger women. Today the trio of magazines is fatter than ever and report record advertising revenues.