Fashion 101: How Magazines Cover Trends

By Alexandra SUHNER ISENBERG Editor-at-Large

As part 2 of my Fashion 101 on trends, I'd like to discuss how media presents trends.

We covered where trends come from in the last Fashion 101, so today we will be looking at how magazines present trends to their readers.

The magazines have a job to do, they have to sell issues and they have to encourage their readers to buy more fashion, so that their advertisers are happy. Magazines can't just say "here's a pair of pants" and "here's a top", they need to sell their readers a story, and that is where trends come in. Rather than simply present the looks shown on the catwalks, magazines put together trend themes.

Now here is the scary part of the magazine business. After the fashion shows, each magazine team sits down together and talks through the catwalk shows. They decide what their trends are for the next season's issues. The magazines then send out "their" trends to the PR offices, so that the PRs need to make sure they have pieces in the collections that fit into the magazine's trend stories.

All of this means that the magazines are actually deciding what the trends are, rather than going by what the designers have actually designed...read more