Ever since LOVE magazine hit the newsstands with a naked Beth Ditto on the cover fashionistas everywhere hailed the new style magazine and its fabulous editor Katie Grand as the new Hot Thing. Not that Grand is new to the fashion scene at all, having ruled the roost as editor of uber-trendy style mag POP before her defection to Conde Nast last year amongst speculation that Bauer Media (who own POP) were not committed to her or the magazine. She has also styled campaigns and catwalk shows for Calvin Klein, Marc Jacobs and Louis Vuitton among others. All these juicy fashion contacts may mean that she has hot fashion celebrities queuing up to land the cover of LOVE, but for the up-coming issue she has gone completely the other way, using emerging young and relatively unknown talent for the cover and the content. There are two covers, one of Sting’s model daughter Coco Sumner and one of an eighteen-year-old musician from Birmingham, who was apparently ‘found’ by Grand on the internet. He may have had no idea who she, the photographer or the magazine was when he agreed to star on the cover but needless to say, having Katie Grand pick you out of nowhere must be a helping hand on the road to stardom.
Across London in the Bauer Media offices, POP is set to rival LOVE in the Hot Thing stakes with its debut issue under new editor Dasha Zhukova. The cover was leaked online yesterday (seen on constantly updated blog Fashionologie.com) but has been taken off more mainstream sites such as Grazia Daily this afternoon. If the cover is official, it features a 13-year-old blogger called Tavi in artwork by Damian Hirst. The use of an unknown face combined with the credibility of an art world heavyweight such as Hirst is surely a bold move on Zhukova’s part, but it is interesting that both POP and LOVE have chosen young talent for their upcoming issues. Let the fashion mag battles commence…
