‘Elle’’s Robbie Myers on Why the Digital Age Won’t Kill Fashion Magazines

Robbie Myers at the Fashion Media Awards. Photo: Getty Images

Robbie Myers, who’s been Editor-in-Chief of Elle magazine for 15 years, knows a thing or two about what makes for an engaging read. According to the glossy’s publisher, Hearst, Elle’s September 2015 issue was its biggest (literally, in terms of pages) ever. And in terms of a magazine’s success, page numbers are everything.

There’s no denying that it’s a special skill to keep a publication afloat in an age when physical magazines seem to be folding on a monthly basis. And to its credit, Elle has been doing just that for three decades. We caught up with Myers at Thursday’s Daily Front Row Fashion Media Awards—where she was accepting the honor for Fashion Magazine of the Year on behalf of Elle—to find out how she’s doing it.

As she explains, it’s all about picking and choosing what topics to cover where, and how. For Elle and Elle.com, which have completely separate staffs and only occasionally cross reference each other, that means deciding what works best as a researched story versus a timely ‘quick hit.’

“You do what the medium is best at,” Myers told Yahoo Style. “So, our website is great at news. We’re on it, and it’s full of the facts and attitude and our point of view on the day-to-day stuff. And what a magazine can do, is step back and look at things with a little more perspective and depth.”

Myers also touched on the feeling of permanence and high esteem that comes with a physical magazine. “A photograph in a fashion magazine is still considered to be the ultimate interpretation by the stylists and the editors of what you really can do with fashion—and seeing what’s going to be good for you as a reader, interpreted not straight from the runway, but through the eyes of the editors that you identify with,” she said. “That’s one of the great things that a fashion magazine can do.”

Another thing a magazine can do? Educate and influence the masses on a major scale. Myers touched on Elle’s history as a political publication, noting that it’s been covering Hillary Clinton’s career since the 90s—and said the 2016 presidential election will be no different, albeit with a slight feminist twist.

“We’re gonna do what we always do, which is, use our resources in Washington to tell good stories that really illuminate what it means,” she said. “We are doing something called ‘Hillary Watch,’ because, for the first time, we have a woman running who has a really credible shot at winning. So we’re going to do what a women’s magazine should do, which is sort of examine that through what it means for women… and what it means to have, I hope, women representing us more fully in the government.”

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