LONDON, United Kingdom — Last Thursday evening, BoF editor-in-chief Imran Amed sat down with Jefferson Hack, founder and editorial director of Dazed Group — independent publishers of Dazed & Confused, Dazed Digital, AnOther Magazine and AnOther Man — to discuss the future of fashion media amidst an industry landscape that’s being radically reshaped by the forces of digital revolution, rapid globalisation and a post-recessionary economy. Called Fashion Pioneers, the event was the first in a new series of intimate, live-streaming conversations between Mr. Amed and the fashion industry’s most interesting operators. (RSS Readers: The interview video can be viewed here)

Opening the evening, Mr. Hack spoke passionately about teaming up with Rankin Waddell in 1992 to launch Dazed & Confused, then a black and white, self-distributed fanzine, positioned as a “cultural alternative” to both mainstream publications and cult style magazines of the moment, i-D and The Face. “We were complete outsiders,” he said. Dazed & Confused began as a way of “legitimising what was fringe or niche culture” but ultimately gave rise to “the trans-disciplinary integration of fashion, music, art and film, a template that’s become de rigueur in alternative culture magazines around the world,” said Mr. Hack.

Pressed on how the recent global economic crisis had impacted Dazed Group, Mr Hack was optimistic: “In times of recession, war and global uncertainty, people feel a connection to content that has meaning, that is authentic. What we’ve lost in revenue from some of our advertisers, we’ve definitely made up in market share and connection to our audience.”

As the evening continued, the conversation honed in on a vital and multifaceted subject that’s currently on the collective fashion brain: the future of fashion magazines in a digital age.

Today, people are consuming more fashion content than ever before. But as readers migrate online, monetisation remains a challenge. On this point, Mr. Hack cited a variety of business models, from freemium and subscriber-only content to sponsorships and ad-supported content, emphasising that there was no single solution to the problem: “There are many different micro ways to do it. There’s not one revenue model.”

On the content side of the equation, Mr. Hack noted that the process of creating a cover story had changed significantly with the rise of digital media, becoming a much more collaborative interaction with the cover star. Citing the recent Tilda Swinton cover story for Dazed & Confused, Mr. Hack said that he had asked himself: “what content can she create with us, not just how can we photograph and interview her.”

Ultimately, they decided to create a short film with Glen Luchford that complemented the print story and premiered both online at Dazed Digital and at the Curzon cinema in London. Via social media, fans from around the world were also able to participate and ask questions.

“It’s about creating an event and creating multi-platform content that can go beyond print,” said Mr. Hack, rejecting an oppositional relationship between print and digital and dismissing the much-heralded death of physical magazines in favour of a model that stresses deeper integration between media forms.

“For me, the web is about the moment. The magazine is much more about the collective memory. The magazine becomes a souvenir of what’s happening in the moment. Magazines won’t disappear, they’ll almost become more important in some ways,” said Mr. Hack, highlighting the growing importance of “specialisation” and what visionary science fiction author and futurist William Gibson terms mooks: “a hybrid of a book and a magazine where stories can be told in depth with beautiful photography.”

Both online and off, “the future of magazines is niche and independent,” said Mr. Hack, revealing for the first time a new Dazed Group initiative that launches this autumn: a series of incubator-like “satellite blogs” that will open up the Dazed & Confused platform to niche content creators and contributors in satellite cities around the world “like Reykjavik, Moscow and Sao Paulo where there is real energy… Mumbai for instance.” It’s a forward-thinking move that applies the philosophy of open software development and open platforms to content creation and magazines, proving that Mr. Hack understands digital media at a level that many of his peers do not.

If the future is about openness, it’s also about fluidity. This means digitally integrating into people’s lives wherever (and whenever) they are: “Let people engage with content when and how they want,” advised Mr. Hack, as he revealed, also for the first time, a demo of the new Dazed & Confused iPad application, which launches this summer with the magazine’s August issue.

We’ve been in an “initiation phase,” said Mr. Hack on the digital experimentation we’ve seen across the fashion industry thus far. “We are now entering into what is going to be a much deeper engagement phase,” he continued, citing Prada’s long-form digital film First Spring as an example of richer digital engagement.

“The old media model is a frozen moment in time; a monthly magazine, a seasonal trend — it’s over,” he said. “Digital culture is a constant stream. Either you adapt to it, or you are a dinosaur and you will die.”

Distilling many of his thoughts into a short, poetic mantra, Mr. Hack announced: “This is a new era of digital beauty.” At BoF, we think the new digital beauty — born from relentless digital innovation and characterised by fluid, multi-sensory elegance — is an extremely powerful theme that we will be covering and commenting on in the weeks and months to come.

Fashion Pioneers was presented in collaboration with Morgans Hotel Group and filmed by Pundersons Gardens. Many thanks to our friends from the fashion blogosphere who live-streamed the event to a global audience. Plans for our next Fashion Pioneers talk are already underway. Stay tuned to BoF for further details.

A selection of images from the event, held at London’s Sanderson Hotel

LONDON, United Kingdom —Today, the BoF team is busy preparing for our first FASHION PIONEERS interview with Jefferson Hack, Editorial Director of Dazed Group, to be held this Thursday at London’s Sanderson Hotel. Tickets for the event are completely sold out and a mix of BoF readers and friends from London’s fashion community will be joining us.

But, we want as many people as possible to participate in the interview. So, we are delighted to announce that in addition to a livestream on BoF, our friends from across the fashion and luxury blogosphere have graciously agreed to help us bring FASHION PIONEERS to the world. The event will be live streamed on the following sites:

United States: Refinery29 | Tavi Gevinson | Fashionista.com | JC Report

United Kingdom: Style Bubble | Fashion156

France: A Shaded View on Fashion | Luxury Society

Philippines: Bryanboy

Germany: Les Mads

We invite you all to tune in. And while you are watching, please send questions for Jefferson Hack to our Twitter account @_BoF_ using the hashtag #pioneers.

The livestream begins at 2pm New York | 7pm London | 8pm Paris and Berlin | 2am Manila (that’s for you, Bryanboy!)

Fashion Pioneers is presented in collaboration with Morgans Hotel Group and will be filmed by Pundersons Gardens

LONDON, United Kingdom — There are only 10 days until The Business of Fashion’s first FASHION PIONEERS interview with Jefferson Hack, Editorial Director of Dazed Group, at London’s Sanderson Hotel, and tickets for the live interview event have been snapped up at a rapid clip.

Already, fifty percent of the seats are gone. So, for those of you in London, given that everyone’s travel plans have been put on hold by that pesky, unpronounceable volcano in Iceland, why not join us for an evening that you can reach by tube, bus or taxi? No airplane required.

On 29 April, an intimate crowd of BoF readers, creative and business leaders, and digital innovators from London’s fashion community will gather to listen to Jefferson Hack speak about his fashion media career spanning almost two decades, the future of fashion magazines, and the East London hotbed from which he builds his creative teams for Dazed & Confused, Dazed Digital, AnOther Magazine and AnOther Man.

Since FASHION PIONEERS was unveiled, we have received requests from frustrated (and enthusiastic) BoF readers outside London asking whether they would be able to participate in the interview somehow. We are working on livestreaming the event and will be taking questions for Jefferson via Twitter, so as many of you can participate as possible. Send a tweet to @_BoF_ with your questions and stay tuned to BoF for more news.

Limited remaining tickets available for FASHION PIONEERS available here at £40, plus VAT.

Fashion Pioneers is presented in collaboration with Morgans Hotel Group and will be filmed by Pundersons Gardens

LONDON, United Kingdom — The Business of Fashion is pleased to announce the launch of FASHION PIONEERS, a series of live interview events with the industry’s most interesting operators, set amidst a fashion landscape that’s being radically reshaped by the forces of digital revolution and rapid globalisation in a post-recessionary economy.

Fashion Pioneers is presented in collaboration with Morgans Hotel Group and will be filmed by Pundersons Gardens

In the third and final installment of our in-depth feature on the future of fashion magazines, we address the biggest online trend of all — the fashion film.

LONDON, United Kingdom — Pioneered by SHOWstudio and powered by the spread of broadband internet and the popularity of video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo, fashion film has emerged as the most influential new format for fashion editorial online. Shorts like “Black and White,” captured on set by Nick Knight and former assistant Ruth Hogben during Mr Knight’s shoots for British Vogue, use music and movement to communicate the power and poetry of fashion in a way that static editorial simply can’t.

Fashion film has taken off at Dazed Digital also. “We have been experimenting with some of these directors to shoot fashion videos direct to the web and the results are cost effective and really impressive,” said Jefferson Hack. For a recent editorial previewing the Autumn/Winter 2009 menswear collections, Dazed Digital published an online fashion film, shot by Matt Irwin and styled by Robbie Spencer, to accompany the still images.

But what’s resonating with readers? The beauty of digital is that publishers can monitor success and failure in realtime. “We’re able to pin-point with incredible accuracy, article by article and shoot by shoot, what people are really looking at,” said Jefferson Hack. “The blogging and re-tweeting of content also shows what’s really capturing people’s imaginations. It’s a tremendously useful feedback loop for the editors.”

Indeed, the ability to capture and quantify realtime feedback from readers themselves has helped build a stronger business case for lots of digital experiments and encouraged others in fashion media to follow suit.

Faced with the new digital reality, more and more fashion magazines are launching interactive experiments of their own. POP plans to redevelop thepop.com to coincide with its re-launched next season under new editorial direction, while i-D has promised that its “restructuring” will come with a renewed focus on the web. According to Matthew Hawker, Production Director at the magazine and the person charged with relaunching i-Dmagazine.com, the revamped web experience will include “a sophisticated content management system that will allow the world’s best photographers, stylists, DJs, filmmakers and designers to create their own environments within the editorial control of Terry Jones and the i-D team.”

So what will fashion magazines look like in a few years’ time? While websites like Dazed Digital and SHOWstudio point the way forward, offering readers greater immediacy and access, new opportunities for participation, and more multi-sensory content than ever before, nobody really knows the answer to that question. That’s because unlike print, digital is a medium that’s always evolving.

“We are now entering the restless world of interactive, self-created, digital-imaging: accessible, downloadable and constantly changing,” said Nick Knight. Indeed, unlike traditional photography that “ends” when the image is developed and printed, digital imagery on the internet has no fixed ending. It can be changed constantly by its creator or programmed to evolve based on inputs as varied as user interaction or time of day.

What Mr. Knight observes about digital imagery is true of digital media at large. Unlike print, the internet is not a stable medium with fixed properties. Quite the contrary. The web is an ever-changing universe in which new media forms like Twitter and Tumblr are literally being born every day. In this ecosystem of constant change, fashion magazines must accept revolution without end and learn to embrace constant experimentation, constant innovation and the constant birth and death of new editorial formats.

Read Part One – A Changing Landscape here and Part Two – Lots of Little Experiments here.

Vikram Alexei Kansara is a digital strategist and writer based in New York.

Images from SHOWstudio's "Dress Me Up, Dress Me Down"

Last time we surveyed the rapidly changing landscape of digital fashion media. Today, in the second part of our series on the future of fashion magazines, we explore the experimental approach that online pioneers like Jefferson Hack and Nick Knight are using to create unique content and experiences that truly bring fashion magazines into the digital age.

LONDON, United Kingdom — The internet’s ability to transmit information immediately, impossible in print and too expensive on television, has changed the way in which we create and consume content perhaps more than anything else. “Print magazines will never be the first to break any news,” said fashion blogger Diane Pernet, whose influential website, A Shaded View on Fashion, has been reporting live from fashion weeks, showrooms and studios around the world, capturing and transmitting the moment almost instantaneously with inexpensive camera phones and laptops.

In response, forward thinking magazines have done two things. Web pioneers like Dazed Digital, a fashion and culture platform launched in November 2006 by the publishers of Dazed & Confused magazine, have begun “live blogging” themselves, posting realtime reports from fashion shows in Paris, London, New York and Milan. But they’ve also learned to focus less on what’s new, a commodity that’s instantly available everywhere, and more on a unique point of view and reader experience that aren’t easily replicated. “It’s got to be more about experiencing the fashion; a stylistic point of view. It’s less and less about information,” said Jefferson Hack, founder and co-publisher at Dazed Group.

Indeed, the success of physical magazines like Purple Fashion and Katie Grand’s new venture Love, which sold-out on newsstands within days of its release, proves that an original point of view and well-crafted reader experience are important, no matter what the medium. But online, where information is easily and instantly exchanged, originality and experience are even more essential in attracting and keeping readers. “Where so many sites are aggregating content or acting as filters, it’s important that all the content on Dazed Digital is originated by us,” underscored Mr. Hack.

The immediacy of the internet has also given readers unprecedented access to the behind the scenes of the fashion industry. “Before, fashion shows were a closed affair for only a handful of professionals around the world. Now the news is dispersed instantly. Fashion is no longer the domain of a very few,” said blogger Diane Pernet. Indeed, amplified by the fashion world’s enthusiastic adoption of Twitter last season, consumer interest in the people and process behind the scenes of fashion is exploding and expectations are rising for fashion media to deliver.

Magazines have responded in some interesting ways. Olivier Zahm of Purple has launched a website called Purple Diary. Using the “micro-blogging” platform Tumblr, the site lets Mr. Zahm and his contributors chronicle their lives in realtime and post instant, and often intimate, updates directly to readers from fashion parties, runway shows, art happenings and photo shoots around the world.

Photographer Nick Knight’s SHOWstudio, which calls itself a “fashion website” rather than a magazine, has gone one step further, allowing its audience immediate and unparalleled access to the entire creative process of making fashion editorials for magazines like V and British Vogue. “The philosophy of the site is based on Nick’s belief that showing the entire creative process – from conception to completion – is beneficial for the artist, the audience and the art itself,” said Alex Fury, fashion director of SHOWstudio.

What’s more, on SHOWstudio the audience is encouraged to respond and contribute to projects that feature some of the most influential names in fashion like Alexander McQueen, Gareth Pugh and Kate Moss. For example, a project called “24 HRS” let viewers influence the narrative of a short film for the launch of Stefano Pilati’s “Edition 24″ collection for Yves Saint Laurent. Directed by Nick Knight, the entire shoot was broadcast live online, while model Jessica Miller acted out treatments submitted by SHOWstudio viewers. Another project, “Dress Me Up, Dress Me Down,” let viewers style model Liberty Ross for a photo shoot. “In a virtual chatroom, viewers posted their ideas for styling outfits for Liberty and forty ‘Stylists’ were chosen from the chatroom to style Liberty in their looks, live, via chatroom instructions,” said Alex Fury.

“Digital is breaking down the boundaries between artist, curator and consumer,” observed Ken Miller, a freelance editor and contributor to V, V Man and Interview magazines. “It’s become much more about the creative experience for all of the participants.”

Dazed Digital has also been experimenting with new ways to let readers participate in the creation of content. In April, Dazed became the first fashion magazine to stage a “twinterview,” giving readers the chance to interview Nathan Howdeshell and Hannah Blilie from The Gossip (Beth Ditto also joined at the last minute) live via Twitter. Dazed has also been using photo sharing site Flickr to source new talent, showcasing young photographers from their Flickr group on Dazed Digital and sometimes commissioning them to shoot for the print edition. “Social networking sites have played a big role in allowing users to participate in the magazine’s development,” said Jefferson Hack.

But perhaps more than anything else, fashion magazines are about fresh and provocative imagery. For decades, that largely meant still photography. But in recent seasons, that’s begun to change. “We are in the midst of a revolution in fashion imagery, moving away from illustration and stills photography,” said Nick Knight, director of SHOWstudio.

Read Part One – A Changing Landscape here and Part Three – The move to fashion film here.

Next time, in our third and final installment, we explore the biggest online fashion force of all — the growing dominance of the online fashion film.

Vikram Alexei Kansara is a digital strategist and writer based in New York.

Screen shot of DazedDigital.com

Fashion media has long been a BoF obsession. This week, we bring you an in-depth, three part series revealing the strategies, plans and expertise of some of the most innovative and respected players in the online fashion scene. Today, we start with an overview of the rapidly-evolving fashion media landscape.

NEW YORK, United States—A few weeks ago, independent fashion magazine i-D, founded in 1980 by art director Terry Jones, announced it was cutting back its print run to 6 issues per year, while major commercial titles like American Vogue have been forced to slash payroll and scale back on expenses.

Across the spectrum, times are tough for fashion magazines. With ad sales dramatically down, their main source of revenue is evaporating. And while online readership is growing, the “culture of free” that dominates the web means magazines earn nothing from internet subscriptions, while the sale of online ad space simply doesn’t generate enough income to cover cost. It’s a crisis I first examined a few months ago, amidst dark headlines about powerhouse publishers like Condé Nast.

As marketers continue to slash advertising budgets, there’s no doubt the current economic crisis is contributing to the problem. But it’s not the underlying issue. Even if demand for print advertising rebounds when this recession ends, things will never be as they once were. The fact is, we are in the midst of a digital revolution as powerful as Gutenberg that’s causing sustained, seismic upheaval across the publishing industry.

Readers are migrating online, where information is abundantly available and freely shareable. But that doesn’t mean content can’t be monetized. The demand is there. Indeed, people are consuming more content than ever. And there’s no shortage of people who want to supply it. The problem is, the internet is destroying the business structures of the past faster than the structures of the future are being created.

So what’s a magazine to do?

So far, nobody has cracked the code. But what’s increasingly clear is that there’s no single code to crack. As Clay Shirky, internet writer and professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program puts it, “there was one single business model in a world where media was scarce, but there needs to be many when media is abundant.”

In other words, there is no generalized answer to the problems facing publishing. “We are not moving from a world of Business Model A to a world of Business Model B. We are going from Business Model A to Business Models A to Z,” says Mr. Shirky. That means each publication will have to find a model (or models) that suits its particular content, readership and market position.

Although many new business models have been proposed, from “free” content that’s bundled with internet access to micropayments for individual articles, it’s extraordinarily difficult to predict which solutions will work. As with political revolutions, nobody really knows exactly what’s on the other side of this digital upheaval.

What’s more clear is that success is likely to come from lots of little experiments whose importance will be revealed only in retrospect. “Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as Craigslist did, as Wikipedia did,” says Mr. Shirky.

What’s also clear is that the challenge posed by the internet impacts more than business models alone. It’s not just how publishers package and deliver content that’s in play. It’s the content itself.

The internet is transforming the way in which content is both created and consumed, challenging the current emphasis on static words and pictures pasted on a page. Nobody really knows which new formats for telling stories will capture the collective imagination of editors and readers. Again, success is likely to come from lots of little experiments.

But admidst all the uncertainty that revolutions like this create, it’s important to remember writer and futurist William Gibson, who observed: “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” Indeed, amongst the fashion media, a handful of online pioneers have been conducting lots of little experiments in digital content that help point the way forward for their more mainstream counterparts who are just beginning to understand the impact of the internet.

Tomorrow, in part two, we investigate how little online experiments enable trailblazers like Jefferson Hack of Dazed Digital and Nick Knight of SHOWstudio to see into the future of fashion media.

Read Part Two – Lots of Little Experiments here and Part Three – The move to fashion film here.

Vikram Alexei Kansara is a digital strategist and writer based in New York.