In 1982, "AnAn" and "ELLE Japon" were separated. I heard that this was because "AnAn"'s concept changed from a magazine for Paris-loving, fashion-loving women to one that emphasized a stronger Japanese influence. Paris remained a dream destination for fashion-loving Japanese women at the time.

Heibonsha (now Magazine House) changed "ELLE Japon," which had separated from "AnAn," from a biweekly to a monthly magazine (later reverting to a biweekly), and established a chic Parisian style that combined basic and trendy items and incorporated tribal and ethnic sensibilities into a cultural mix. ELLE Japon's contribution was to mass-produce women who aspired not only to Parisian fashion but also to their lifestyle. In the United States, the launch of the American edition of ELLE in 1985 created a new threat to established fashion magazines like Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. The impetus for the launch of the American edition of ELLE was the "France Fair" held in 1983 at Bloomingdale's, America's leading department store, in Manhattan. The English edition of ELLE was distributed free of charge, with some copies sold for a fee. 75% of the copies were sold. Further test runs of the American edition of ELLE were nearly sold out. The magazine's target audience, an average age of 28, highly educated, high-income, and European-oriented women, proved successful in cultivating a new readership and achieving higher-than-expected sales figures. This appealed to the American apparel industry and advertisers, and despite its late start, it was catching up with established fashion magazines. What happened in America also spread to Japanese publishers. France's Hachette Filipacchi Media (hereafter referred to as Hachette) proposed to Magazine House to form a joint venture, but the proposal fell through. They chose America's Time Warner as their new partner, forming a joint venture called Time Hachette, and ELLE Japon launched in July 1989. The new ELLE Japon lineup included Ideishi Shozo as editor-in-chief and Enami Naomi as art director. A system that differed from the traditional Japanese style was the appointment of a mode editor-in-chief, who serves in a parallel role to the editor-in-chief. European fashion magazines appoint editors-in-chief who specialize in fashion. At overseas collections, the mode editor-in-chief often sits in the front row as a representative of the magazine. This is followed by the fashion director and fashion editor. With the introduction of this new system, Hara Yumiko was appointed ELLE Japon's mode editor-in-chief. "Magazine House launched a fashion magazine called 'Clique' to replace 'ELLE Japon,' and Carine Roitfeld, who was a freelance stylist at the time, was in charge of styling. Other magazines were also establishing their own unique editorial styles. Therefore, we hired stylists and photographers who hadn't worked for other magazines, whenever possible. We also created a page featuring 'Japanese' items, which other magazines rarely did, to capture the nuances of the Japanese version of a French magazine," Hara recalls. Building on the success of the American edition of ELLE, Hachette began to control the international editions of ELLE. Although they couldn't read Japanese characters, an AD from the French edition of ELLE came to Japan and held repeated meetings with the Japanese AD to ensure visual consistency. However, Japanese vertical text presented challenges with typesetting and fonts (at the time, editorial departments had begun to use data submissions, the forerunner of DTP), creating too many gaps for mutual understanding.

Hara says that the success of the American edition brought about a major change in the way magazines were made thereafter. It marked a shift from an editor-led era in which circulation increased if magazines were produced by providing high-quality information and creating interesting pages that interested readers, to a new era in which editors-in-chief were required to have the management skills to devise strategies to attract advertising.

References
* "The Work of Hara Yumiko 1970→" by Hara Yumiko (Bookman Publishing)
* "American Magazines 1888-1993" by Kanehira Seinosuke (Nikkei Inc.)

(Continued on 5/12. The 15-year reign of Mori Akiko continues.)