New Vogue on the Block pt.1

I'll start today with a post I divided in two, so stay tuned for the other part wich I'll try to post at the end of the week.

What may be the main reason for regular people like you and me to not read/buy a fashion magazine? I had give this a serious thought, and a few reasons occured to me. The first may be that not knowing anything about the industry makes less apealing to eagerly know, which model graces a certain cover or what photographer took which photos. Second, we can't buy the gorgeous fashion they are selling because it's way too expensive for our budgets. Finally and most important is that fashion magazines are not really aimed to youth, without Nylon or Teen Vogue, magazines are not that approachable to a younger audience, which happens to care and know about fashion without really caring about surrogacy pregnancy, hormones in fish or the latest non-surgical anti-age procedure.

Teen fashion magazines are often frustrating, since they are so caught up with aiming to regular teenagers that you almost never see real fashion in it's pages. Clothes are usually the same all year round and it's just such a playful approach that just very few times we get interesting photos or editorials in its pages.

Angel my best friend just received from a friend who was studying abroad two issues of Vogue Nippon, and after seeing them and discussing them with him I thought it would be really interesting to share them with you. I was insecure about Vogue Nippon because the covers on the internet seemed a little boring and the same white background from Inez and Vinoodh had got me already tired.

It's a whole different deal once you see it live, the colors are brighter, and the magazine itself it's bigger, heavier and made with really nice paper. The content it's fresh and definitely young, but here the differenece is that the magazine is not trying to teach you about fashion or telling you how you should get dress, instead the magazine assumes that you already know how to and just presents itself. Every section feels a lot lighter and fresh, there's more illustration a thing that I personally miss from fashion and in the buy suggestions clothes are not being modeled by anyone and the photos have bigger size which lets you focus more in the garment. In general, Vogue Nippon has sense of humour and is really fun to read but at the same time is creating beautiful images and presenting photographers riskier work.

Click on each image to see them bigger.

The magazines came with three supplements: Brides, Gioiello and Kids. First two had nice covers.

This are the two covers, May and June. Each issue has a tittle this one where: Street Angels and Country Girl.

A behind-the-scenes article of the May cover.

The directory, I don't get how the editor who is doing such a wonderful job doesn't get as much press coverage as their Vogue colleagues.

This are May and June indexes, they have each a different computer-made motiff.

Here are the beautiful letters from the editor Mitsuko Watanabe featuring illustrations from Yukari Miyagi, cute way of personalizing each. May and June.

This section is great, each month they make a summary of what other editions of Vogue have published around the world, the highlights. In my opinion, it also makes a statement, saying that most of your content is original.