Magazines: 100 Years in a Candy Store

Harper’s Bazaar works at being “not merely the arbiter but the vanguard of fashion” through a combination of hard and soft surprises. Hard (far-out) surprises in the March issue, out next week, include Ferrari-inspired shoes that are red, black, green and yellow, and have wheels and a red “2” painted on their sides. Also hard: a “prancesuit” made up of a melon crepe tunic and thigh-tight knee pants with blue crystal trim and blue shoes to match. The soft(expectable) surprise comes in the form of Paris spring fashions, from Dior’s white hunting jacket to St. Laurent’s daytime version of “le smoking.”

The mix of far-out and In, hard and soft, is part of the formula that has kept Bazaar successful since its founding in 1867. This year the magazine celebrates its 100th birthday with a book to be published by Random House and, come fall, a 90-minute TV spectacular, produced by Leland Hayward, on a century of Bazaar women. At 100, Bazaar is second in circulation (424,800) to its fashion-world co-Bible, Vogue (442,000). But Bazaar has fashioned its own niche by aiming at stylish women in Des Moines and Omaha as well as New York and San Francisco. In the pages of Bazaar, models take on the appearance of butterflies and snakes, Egyptian mummies and rockets about to be shot into space, under riotously colored silks, and heaps of sequins and feathers. In a 14-page spread by the Japanese photographer Hiro in the current February issue, models’ bodies seem to disintegrate beneath colorful prints. Yet in the same issue are page after black and white page of elegantly understated suits and coats.

Niece Nancy. Started by Harper & Brothers, the book publishers, as a sort of milady’s “bazar,” the magazine was bought by William Randolph Hearst in 1913 for $10,000, gained a third a in 1929. “We wouldn’t take $10 million now,” says Bazaar’s publisher, William M. Fine. Last year advertising revenues topped $8,000,000, making Bazaar the second biggest moneymaker in the Hearst empire. And in the biggest ad deal in magazine history, Celanese Corp. has bought 100 pages of ads in Bazaar’s October issue for $500,000.

It was Carmel Snow, named Bazaar’s editor in 1932, who gave the magazine its present patina and slickness. In 1958, she was succeeded by her niece, Nancy White. Under her editorship the magazine has become less literary and more topical. While it once ran such titans as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and Thomas Hardy, it now favors such social commentators and fashionable authors as Britain’s Kenneth Tynan and France’s Françoise Sagan. Nancy White and her editors take pride in the fact that Bazaar was the first to play up bikinis (on Suzy Parker), women’s boots, big watches, and was the first to run a man (Steve McQueen) on the cover.

Precious Prose. Nancy White is calm, pleasant, bright, and fun to have around the office—which, in the frantic business of fashion-magazine publishing, is a rare fringe benefit. Bazaar’s quarters are in a drab mid-Manhattan building. Out-of-college girls write most of the precious prose that hard-sells products in Bazaar’s “Beauty” section. Sample: “Since even a whiff of Emilio Pucci’s non-cliché Vivara Perfume is heavenly, a whole new galaxy of products in this free-as-the-wind fragrance sends dedicated Vivara-ites into a happy flutter.” The girls have a few toting privileges: if storerooms become crowded with accessories, they are allowed to help themselves to the oversupply.

Manhattan Designer Norman Norell, a friendly critic, says Harper’s Bazaar is first and foremost a “photographer’s magazine.” Sometimes, as in the April 1965 issue, the photographer—in this instance, Richard Avedon—reaches way out to Alpha Centauri and science fiction for ideas. The issue, which drew hundreds of letters of protest, carried 19 pages of models attired in space suits, op-print dresses and Courreges boots. Not surprisingly, many fashion designers complain that they cannot recognize their own clothes in Bazaar’s artfully contrived photographs. All the same, Bazaar portrays a world of fantasy that proves strangely compelling. “It’s like a kid in a candy store,” says one compulsive reader. “You get a kick just out of looking.”

Nancy White intends to keep it that way. “Our responsibility,” she says, “is to inspire, create and point toward a trend. But actually, the philosophy of the magazine was so well set forth in the first 1867 issue that it couldn’t be said better today.” As the 1867 Bazar put it: “A bazar in oriental parlance is a vast repository for all rare and costly things on earth—silks, velvets, cashmeres, spices, perfumes, and glittering gems; in a word, whatever can comfort the heart and delight the eye is found heaped up there in bewildering profusion. Such a repository we wish Harper’s Bazaar to be, combining the useful with the beautiful.”