When VOGUE came to Germany....
Iris Pfeifer


...“How was it, tell me,” a young man
recently asked me. “How was what?”
“You know, when VOGUE came to Germany! You were part of it!” He’s a nice guy. So I embark on a journey into the past. In the thirteen years since I left
Condé Nast, a lot has happened. Not
only in my life.
The situation of magazine publishers
has also undergone fundamental changes, as I realize when thinking back.

Today, all more or less established publishing houses develop pilots under the seal of secrecy. If necessary,
they takes them out of the drawer in case competing publishers venture to bring out a new magazine. There are heaps of glossies.

In Vienna, where I've been living since a few years, I now visit exhibitions
in tasteful art halls, shows of photographers for whose shots I wrote ordinary captions when working as the beauty editor of DEUTSCHE VOGUE at the beginning of the 1980s: Albert Watson, Guy Bourdin, Herb Ritts, Michel Comte.

I’m also bizarrely touched by the advertising slogans that are always proclaimed when new glossies are launched on the market. For example,
the new magazine being a perfect “combination of substance and elegance.” A claim first made by DEUTSCHE VOGUE in fall of 1979 – and which, as I realize today, remained unfulfilled for a long period of time.

Remembering turns out to be quite difficult. What nobody takes note of anymore today, was inconceivable then. How can one make comprehensible today what was astonishing then?
At the beginning, and far into the 1980s, readers were downright snubbed
by the new magazine. First of all, because only wickedly expensive outfits were presented in the fashion spreads. Who could afford them?
Secondly, because only after endlessly leafing through advertisements did one already frustrated - finally reach the first editorial page. One wasn’t used
to that from conventional magazines.

As opposed to today, a handful of high-circulation magazines peacefully shared the market of women’s magazines in
the 1970s. Each one had its narrowly limited target group, which the other competitors were not really interested in. If one would have given a good
mark for trend awareness and chic in those days, it would have been given to PETRA from the Hamburg-based publisher, Jahreszeitenverlag. Magazines such
as BRIGITTE, FÜR SIE, and FREUNDIN possessed more down-to-earth qualities. At the bottom of the scale – at least the way those working for women’s magazines saw it at the time – was MADAME. Conservative, expensive,
typical of Munich. Since it has meanwhile been shaped for years by former VOGUE and ELLE employees,
you can now no longer really imagine what it was like. In the 1970s, the magazine corresponded to its name –
it was madam-like. The Munich in-crowd, however, loved their MADAME. The magazine was completely tattered when leafed through by women under the
dryer at their hairdresser’s.
...