Stockland Martel

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I hope magazine publishers read Raquel Laneri’s opinion piece on fashion magazines at Forbes.com yesterday. So many publications lately have been racing to work out digital solutions—such as Kindle-like readers, iPhone iterations, and beefier websites—to solve the stubborn problem of falling circ numbers and declining ad revenue. Which means they’ve put themselves in the position of learning and succeeding at a new business model while they’re in crisis mode. Talk about stacking the odds against yourself.

In “Save the Glossies,” Laneri argues that fashion magazines should stick with what they do better than anyone else: offer sumptuous photography and wonderfully-out-of-reach flights of fancy. And they should do it in print. “Most readers buy Vogue, or really any fashion magazine, for the photographs: sylphs dressed in diaphanous gowns in a verdant forest, saucy girls dressed in Jazz Age finery in Parisian cafes, glamazons posing haughtily in their haute couture,” she writes.

“The ‘editorial,’ or fashion spread, is the fashion magazine’s saving grace: It is the one thing that Web sites and blogs actually can’t replicate; they neither have the money nor the connections to acquire the fashions displayed (which appear in the magazines before they hit stores) or the photographers used.”

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“The Internet can give us runway pictures and analysis faster than any print publication ever could, but it hasn’t yet figured out a way to capture the experience of a great fashion editorial. If magazines were smart, they’d hold on to that.”

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Before we continue with Laneri’s cogent argument for spending more on photography, let me briefly introduce you to a brand-new addition to Stockland Martel: fashion/beauty/celebrity photographer Nino Muñoz. His portfolio hasn’t gone live yet at our site, but you can see his work at his website, plus here’s a cover he shot of Gisele Bundchen for British style mag Arena in 2008. I’ll be telling you lots more about Nino in the coming weeks.

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Photo by Nino Muñoz—now represented by Stockland Martel.

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Okay, back to Laneri, who even goes so far as to advocate for fashion pubs to hire non-fashion photogs, “as Paris Vogue did when it hired art-world star Cindy Sherman to photograph Balenciaga’s new line in 2007. There are many photographers who have used fashion and clothing in innovative ways in their work—such as Tanya Marcuse, who has shot wigs and jewelry on wax mannequins, and Miyako Ishiuchi, whose series of diaphanous lace slips and old lipstick tubes belonging to her mother were among the most haunting and beautiful images shown during ICP’s entire “Year of Fashion.”

There’s more, and you’ll find it here.

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