Niche Fashion Magazines as Micro Societies

The paper aims to discuss the functioning of niche fashion magazines, the ones that are positioned outside the commercial circuit and are widely distributed. In doing so, the paper focuses on two French case studies, "Purple" and "Self Service", founded in the first half of the nineties and still active today. These magazines both are models in the responses and impulses provided to the editorial panorama through the questioning of established practices of production, distribution and fruition as well as the construction of an alternative to the official circuit. The paper dwells on the importance of niche fashion magazines not as means of mediation or communication but as "places" in which people can act, recognize and establish relations with one another. These publications may be understood as "micro societies" and they construct communities that are shaped by their founders, their readers and all those who in one way or another contribute to their evolution. The definition of niche magazines is based on the interest in investigating the dimension of the group, which is practiced and protected by the founders. The choice of the term niche magazines, used in the academic field mainly in sociological research and recently in fashion studies, is associated with the need to question it, or rather to free it, in the discussion, from the language of marketing. Quoting Elein Fleiss and Olivier Zahm, founders of "Purple", "a magazine is not exactly media, in the sense of information; it is a visual, textual space that can shape a generation. In its pages, a generation invents itself, finds itself, and deceives itself" (E. Fleiss and O. Zahm, "Purple Anthology: Art, Prose, Fashion, Music, Architecture, Sex", New York: Rizzoli International-Purple Institute, 2008, 11).