Daily Front Row

2010 November 8

She's So Lucky: A Look at Brandon Holley's First Issue

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Left: November 2010. Right: December 2010.
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(NEW YORK) It's been exactly two months since Brandon Holley was named editor-in-chief of Lucky, a move that genuinely shocked the show-going fashionettes. The former launch editor of Yahoo Shine, Holley's name is already atop the December masthead---which jarringly enough, commemorates the magazine's 10th anniversary. Holley and Condé Nast have remained mum about specific reasons for founding editor Kim France's departure, but ad pages could be partly responsible: Lucky fell 26.8% in 2009 (versus 2008), and 2010 pages have continued the trend (albelit far less dramatically, around 1.4% through the summer issues).

Holley has enlisted a new team, most notably by hiring Alexis Bryan Morgan away from Elle and enlisting Andy Spade's Partners & Spade to revamp Lucky's look. (As reported by The Daily, the mag's founding creative director Andrea Linett left shortly after Holley arrived.) The complete redesign will be unveiled in the March 2011 issue, but small-scale changes have been implemented in December---even though much of the content was created during France's tenure. The black-and-red type and vintage inspiration images, mainstays of the old Lucky formula, have remained, but the handwriting-ish and serif headlines have been marginalized in favor of bold italic fonts. The Style Spy section has reapproprated the handwriting to describe key trends like "preppy and sweet" and "slouchy and roomy," which are connected to the image with an arrow.   

Models and real women are also getting a bit more play, namely in a "How-to" section focused on party dressing that features "five of our favorites girls about town." The token celebrity fashion story goes out to Lake Bell, while a city-by-city gift guide offers a remarkable amount of stuff approrpiate for women whose style fits loosely into the geographic categories of Seattle, Los Angeles, Austin, New Orleans, Boston, and New York. A new back page "My Mom, the Style Icon," loosely generated from Piper Weiss' blog, mymomthestyleicon.com, underscores the book's inherent inspiration-to-reality mission. OK, OK---big changes coming in March.
ASHLEY BAKER