Yes, the way to a woman’s heart really is shopping!

WHEN I was given the job of editing Vogue back in 1992, it was because the owners needed someone with more journalistic than fashion experience to go into battle with Marie Claire, the recent magazine import from France then becoming very successful in the UK.

Its mix of fashion and sexy human interest stories – ‘I slept with my boyfriend’s twin!’ – was winning over readers and advertisers, some of whom had shifted their loyalty from Vogue.

How times change. Last week sadly, the print version of that once impressive magazine was closed down, another supposed victim of the digital revolution.

But hang on a minute. Might it be that it is not only digital that is taking a wrecking ball to the print landscape? Might it not also be that magazines are publishing less and less of what their readers honestly want? And the clue here is in the ‘honestly’.

One of the main attractions of that original Marie Claire was a fashion round-up called 101 Ideas. It was brilliant. It was stuffed with affordable clothes to buy and clever fashion tricks and it was what most people bought the magazine for, although they wouldn’t admit that. They’d say they bought it for a feature on female genital mutilation. 101 Ideas was killed off years ago but if I were starting a magazine I’d bring it back to life immediately.

Magazines have to strike a balance between content with aspirational lustre that readers think they ought to enjoy and stuff that genuinely interests them. I remember legendary Tatler editor Mark Boxer hiring cookery writer Elizabeth David so people could say that was why they read the magazine when we all knew what they really wanted was to pore over posh party pictures. Of course magazines also need to reflect their times which is why currently so many are filling their