551,351 reasons why Glamour is Britain’s number one magazine

Leona Lewis is on the cover of the December issue of Glamour. It’s called the “party issue”, but the X Factor star is dressed down in a grey sweater, minimal make-up and loose hair. She is very pretty, but has a natural, low maintenance and approachable look: key ingredients which mark Glamour out from its Condé Nast stablemates such as Vogue and Tatler which, for all but the very few, are more about aspiration than attainability.

These were the principles with which it was launched almost eight years ago, and how the editor, Jo Elvin, hopes it will stand out from the pack if consumers and advertisers begin to choose which magazine they invest in more carefully come the new year.

“It’s attainable luxury,” explains Elvin. “Anybody can pick it up and feel good about themselves, but at the same time it’s a Condé Nast magazine: the photographers are amazing and the writers are all A-class, which gives the gloss and luxury to something that’s quite populist.”

Populist it certainly is – putting a reality television star on the cover attests to that – but so do the numbers. At the last count Glamour was selling truckloads more copies than its nearest competitors, 551,351 to Cosmopolitan’s 470,735 and Marie Claire’s 316,765. Neither Elvin or her publisher, Simon Kippin, are glib about the predicted tough times ahead for the industry – Kippin has just returned from visiting advertising clients in Milan where, while no one is decimating their budgets, all are cautious about the months to come.

Glamour is also celebrating a new launch this month – a revamped Glamour.com overseen by Emanuela Pignataro, the CondéNet UK country manager, who is making sure that Condé Nast’s online presence lives up to the quality print brands. Highlights include Glamour TV, regular contrib

utor James Brown (A-list hair stylist and best friend of Kate Moss) and a blog by Elvin. But the money shot, as any good web editor knows, is in the picture galleries. Pignataro has cleverly designed the many fashion and celebrity picture galleries to reveal a peek of each picture coming up, to encourage users to keep clicking and her page impressions healthy.

At the British Society of Magazine Editors awards ceremony two weeks ago, the Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman won the award for women’s magazines, the category in which Elvin had been nominated. But the Editor’s Editor of the Year Award went to Jane Bruton of Grazia, the runaway weekly launch of 2006 which had other women’s editors quaking in their stilettos.

Elvin admits that it might sound twee to say that it’s nice just to be nominated. But she insists that it is, especially so many years after the launch of a magazine that people wrote off as a gimmick because of its smaller size. Besides, she is a five-time winner of the Editor of the Year award and has also bagged the Editors’ Editor trophy. She says the impact of the weeklies is “short term”, and that the blip in Glamour’s sales happened a year after Grazia appeared as new titles jostled for position in the magazine market.

Elvin believes that she has seen off the critics who said her magazine was all smaller style and no substance. “All of our competitors do their traditional size and this size,” she says. “I knew that would happen and I welcomed it. People used to say it was just because of the size, but it hasn’t had the great gain for others that it has for us.” She always thought the size a point of difference rather than a risk, and was already a fan of Italian Glamour and had launched B and Sugar before Condé Nast came knocking. “I was instantaneously enthusiastic and thought instinctively it was right.”

Often each month’s sales come down to the star on the cover. Leona Lewis got the popular vote – everyone Elvin knows, from her friends to her nanny, said they loved her. More often than not, Glamour goes head-to-head with Elle to secure the right name for this crucial slot, and Elvin says she normally gets her girl.

When the magazine was still in dummy form, she raced around Los Angeles begging publicists to give her a great name with which to launch it, and is eternally grateful to Kate Winslet for saying yes. Recent covers she is proud of feature Victoria Beckham – “She polarises women but I love her and she really shifts mags” – and Gwyneth Paltrow, who chose Glamour as her first cover after a considerable time out of the spotlight. Do these women ever do shoots when they have nothing to promote? “In 2006 Britney contacted her publicist and said, I want to look pretty again, can you ring Glamour? I don’t think she had much going on.”

Glamour makes a point of dealing with the humdrum as well as Hollywood. High street fashion is part of this, but the health pages are particularly important. After a feature on ovarian cancer, a number of readers wrote in to say that it had prompted them to get a check up and then catch the disease in its early stages. “Sadly, you get a lot more from a four-page article in Glamour on IBS than you do with your six minutes at the GP.”

She is also proud of her writers, particularly Celia Walden, who gossips with Paul O’Grady in the current issue. “She always gives great copy and has a great flirtatious style whether she’s interviewing a man or a woman, which relaxes them. Chrissy Illey writes for us, Sylvia Patterson, Amanda Platell, Jane Moore and Piers [Morgan]. It’s a nice gathering.”

Elvin, 38, is Australian and was raised in Sydney where she devoured magazines, many of them British, hoping that she would make it over here one day. She arrived in London aged 22 and threw herself into the world of the glossies. “I have grown up in the industry,” she says, and the annual BSME awards are a catch-up opportunity with friends and former colleagues. Since getting married and having a daughter, who is now three, she is better able to appreciate the scarce lows of her job, such as queuing for hours outside fashion shows. A week of meeting film stars and designers, she points out, can be followed by a week of proof-reading and fact-checking.

A straw poll of my friends reveals only one who reads Glamour, but she is the one who buys her favourite magazine loyally every month.

She is also the one who is reacting to the credit crunch by renegotiating her mortgage, instead of panic buying shoes on Net-a-Porter, even though she is one of the more solvent, and stylish, people I know. “I have to read the FT and The Times for work every day, but I still want to look at shiny things,” she says. “Glamour satisfies that, and it has the right mix of high street and high end.” She calls back to emphasize the importance of price.

Elvin says she is after the premium economy market, and if this, highly irregular, piece of market research is anything to go by, she knows her Glamour girls.