The Best Fashion Magazines: Famous Names, UK Editions and What Each Title Is Really For

The Tatler on your newsagent’s shelf traces its name to a paper that Richard Steele started in 1709, which is why anyone compiling the best fashion magazines has to decide early whether age counts. Nobody reads a 1709 journal for hemlines. The modern Tatler, a monthly society glossy, dates from 1901, and it has belonged to Condé Nast since 1982. That small puzzle is a fair preview of the whole subject: the famous titles share a lot of vocabulary and very little else.

This guide sorts the best fashion magazines by what they actually do for a reader. It covers the famous fashion magazine names, the UK editions and British originals, magazines like Vogue, popular fashion magazines for women, and the titles a fashion student should pick up. Facts are limited to what could be checked against publisher pages or reference works, and nothing here depends on prices or circulation figures, which change faster than a guide can follow.

Famous fashion magazine names, in order of age

Start with dates, because they settle a surprising number of arguments.

Harper’s Bazaar began on 2 November 1867 as a weekly called Harper’s Bazar, modelled on a German publication, Der Bazar. The second “a” arrived in November 1929, the same year its British edition appeared. Hearst has owned it since 1913. By any sensible count it is the oldest of the big fashion magazines still on sale, and it rarely gets credit for it because Vogue is louder.

Vogue itself was founded on 17 December 1892 by Arthur Baldwin Turnure, and Condé Nast bought it in 1909. Cosmopolitan began in 1886 as a “first-class family magazine” from Schlicht and Field, owned later by William Randolph Hearst, and it was not a fashion title at all until much later. The long run of the title is covered in the guide to the oldest magazines, where the argument about what counts as “a magazine” gets a proper airing.

The best fashion magazines for UK readers

British readers have an unusual amount of choice, partly because London is where several of the best fashion magazines were invented rather than imported.

British Vogue came first, in 1916. It was the first edition of Vogue produced outside the United States, and the reason was wartime logistics: the American edition could not be shipped to Britain, so a British one was launched instead. The editors since then form a short and weighty list on the reference pages: Audrey Withers from 1940, Beatrix Miller from 1964, Alexandra Shulman from 1992 to 2017, Edward Enninful from 2017 and Chioma Nnadi from 2023. Enninful announced his departure in June 2023, and his last cover was the March 2024 issue. For most UK readers who want one glossy that does everything, this is the default pick, and the monthly schedule suits a household that buys one magazine a month.

Harper’s Bazaar UK is the sensible second purchase if the first has been read to pieces. In a side-by-side read of a single month, the pair look more alike than either house would admit.

Elle arrived in Britain in 1985, with Yasmin Le Bon on the cover, forty years after Hélène Gordon-Lazareff founded the French original in Paris. Its tone is brisker and more practical than Vogue’s. Marie Claire came to the UK in 1988 and stopped printing after its November 2019 issue, when TI Media moved it to a digital-first model; Future publishes the title now. If you want a printed Marie Claire in the UK today, you will be disappointed, and it is better to find out before subscribing. Grazia started life as a Mondadori title in Italy in November 1938, reached Britain in February 2005 under licence to Bauer, and is a weekly, which makes it the only title here that dates itself in days rather than months.

Then there are the British originals. Tatler covers society, style and the royal calendar, and Tina Brown’s editorship between 1979 and 1983 made it a better magazine than its readership was strictly entitled to. i-D and Dazed, covered below, come from a quite different London.

Magazines like Vogue

The phrase “magazines like Vogue” hides two separate requests. One reader wants something equally lavish. Another wants the same subject handled with less deference. The answers differ.

For lavish, the nearest match is Harper’s Bazaar. The two compete for the same advertisers and run similar runway coverage each season. For a looser, more accessible read, Elle is the usual choice. For something deliberately odd, W is the best of the magazines like Vogue: it began in April 1972 as a bi-weekly supplement to Women’s Wear Daily, became an independent consumer magazine in 1993, and is printed oversized, which gives pictures more room than a standard glossy ever could. It publishes seven times a year and has editions in South Korea and China. It has changed hands repeatedly. Fairchild owned it until 1999, Condé Nast until 2019, and a series of smaller owners since then, so the magazine you buy today is a different company’s product from the one in a 1990s library.

A caution. Many lists of magazines like Vogue include Vanity Fair, which is Condé Nast but not a fashion title, and Teen Vogue, which is Vogue in name only. Neither does the job asked of them.

Popular fashion magazines for women, and a note on men

Popular fashion magazines for women are mostly a story of one formula repeated. Cosmopolitan is the instructive case. Founded in 1886, it was a general family magazine until Helen Gurley Brown became editor in 1965 and stayed for 32 years, remaking it as a magazine for single working women. Brown’s version was so successful that it created a template for Marie Claire, Elle’s lifestyle pages and the whole weekly sector. Its British edition followed in 1972.

The best of the popular fashion magazines now tend to be those that have decided exactly what they are not. Elle does not try to be Vogue. Grazia makes no pretence of being an art object. Marie Claire’s move online shows what happens when a print title cannot hold the advertising to cover its costs.

Men are served by GQ and Esquire, which are lifestyle titles with fashion sections rather than fashion magazines proper. For men’s fashion as a serious subject, i-D, Dazed and Business of Fashion are more useful than either, and none of them is gendered at all.

Elle, Tatler and two odd histories

Two of these histories are stranger than their covers suggest.

Hélène Gordon-Lazareff, who founded Elle in 1945, was born in Russia and raised in Paris. She wanted a magazine for a new type of woman, as the reference account of the title puts it: independent, modern, active, comfortable in her own skin. The name simply means “she”. It took forty years for that idea to reach British newsagents, but the first UK cover with Yasmin Le Bon showed how deliberately it was packaged.

Tatler’s path is messier. The modern magazine absorbed The Bystander in 1940 and traded for a while as The Tatler and Bystander. Between 1965 and 1968 it was renamed London Life, and under Mark Boxer it became a chronicle of the Swinging Sixties rather than of country houses. Then the old name came back. Anyone using the cuttings of the period should check which masthead they are holding.

The best fashion magazines for students

If you are studying fashion, the question changes from “which looks best on the coffee table” to “which will teach me something I can cite”.

Business of Fashion is the strongest pick. Imran Amed started it as a blog from Notting Hill in 2007, added a paywall in October 2016, and received an MBE in 2017 for services to fashion. The Columbia Journalism Review has described it as part trade reporting and part networking, and that mix is why it is useful to a student: it shows how the industry talks to itself. Its main flaw is the one every paywalled site has. A student without an institutional login will see only part of it. Check your college library’s database list before paying for anything.

Women’s Wear Daily and W cover the trade and the glossy end respectively from the same house. Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar provide the canonical record of what was photographed when, which is useful to anyone writing about a particular decade. A good dissertation will quote all three types, so do not rely on only one. The mix matters because each type fails in a different way. The trade press assumes you already know the vocabulary. The glossies assume you do not care about the labour behind the clothes. The independents assume you already agree with them.

A practical routine for a term: read Business of Fashion for the argument, a monthly Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar for the picture of what the industry is selling, and one independent title for the gap between the two. Keep a note of the issue date every time, because fashion writing without a date is almost useless as evidence.

For design history, a back run of any famous title is also a primary source. The guide to famous magazine covers describes how covers are built and why certain ones are remembered, and the page on how a magazine cover is put together covers mastheads, cover lines and barcodes.

i-D, Dazed and the independent fashion magazine names

The best-known independent fashion magazine names belong to two London titles with similar origins.

Terry Jones launched i-D in August 1980 as a hand-stapled fanzine. The wink and smile appear on every cover. It gave early exposure to photographers including Wolfgang Tillmans, Mario Testino and Nick Knight, and later featured cultural figures from Madonna to Rihanna. In November 2023 Bedford Media bought it from Vice, publication paused, and it resumed in spring 2025 as a biannual title, with Steff Yotka as editor-in-chief. That gap is worth knowing about: back issues are easy to find, and recent ones are rarer than the brand’s online presence suggests.

Dazed was started in 1991 by Jefferson Hack, Rankin and Ian C Taylor while they were studying at the London College of Printing, and began as a black-and-white folded poster. It was called Dazed and Confused until February 2014, is now a quarterly, and sits inside Dazed Media alongside AnOther Magazine and Nowness. Of the two, Dazed is the better guide to what young London is wearing. The reading experience is less ordered than Vogue’s, which is the point.

Both are better value for a student than a famous glossy, and neither will ever look like Condé Nast.

How a French idea became a global brand

Few of the famous names stayed in one country. Wikipedia counts 28 international editions of Vogue as of March 2025, around 33 of Harper’s Bazaar, 32 of Marie Claire and as many as 51 of Elle. The numbers shift as licences are signed or lapse, so treat any figure as a snapshot. What matters for a UK reader is that an edition is not a translation. British Vogue has its own editor, its own commissioning and its own idea of which designers deserve a cover.

Elle shows how the licensing works. Lagardère kept the French edition and the brand oversight, and in 2011 Hearst bought the right to publish Elle in fifteen countries. Marie Claire, founded in Paris in 1937 by Jean Prouvost and Marcelle Auclair, was built on a similar pattern of local editions under a shared name. If you pick up two editions of the same title from different countries, expect a shared logo and little else.

The detailed edition-by-edition account is in the Vogue guide. A title with many national editions is not automatically the one with the best fashion writing, and the two measures rarely overlap.

Who gets on the cover, and when

Covers are where fashion magazines show their politics, whether they intend to or not. Beverly Johnson appeared on American Vogue in August 1974, the first Black model on its cover. Naomi Campbell followed on French Vogue in August 1988, and the reported story is that Yves Saint Laurent threatened to pull his advertising if the magazine kept refusing. Vogue Italia published an issue in July 2008 using only Black models. It sold out and was reprinted twice, a first for Condé Nast, although the issue was also criticised for the lack of Black models in its advertisements.

Those are three covers across thirty-four years, which is its own statement about how slowly the industry moved. In April 2008 LeBron James appeared on American Vogue with Gisele Bündchen, and in December 2020 Harry Styles became the first man to appear alone on its cover. Each time the magazine was accused of both progress and publicity, and both charges were usually fair.

Cosmopolitan, Elle and Harper’s Bazaar have their own cover histories, and the page on famous magazine covers goes through how such images are judged. The practical point for a reader is that cover choices change faster than editors do. A magazine you rejected five years ago may look different now.

The September issue and the seasonal calendar

The thickest issue of the year at the big glossies is the September one, because it carries the autumn collections and the advertising that follows. R. J. Cutler’s 2009 documentary, The September Issue, followed the production of the record-breaking September 2007 issue of American Vogue. It is worth watching if you want to know what an editor actually does, and it is the only film on the subject that most casual readers will have heard of.

British readers will find the same rhythm at a smaller scale. Spring and autumn issues carry the most pages of runway coverage, and the months in between are filled with beauty, travel and profiles. If you buy only twice a year, buy those two.

A short reading order

The titles above can be sorted by what you need, which is faster than reading them all.

• For one general magazine every month: British Vogue.
• For long profiles and a second opinion on the same collections: Harper’s Bazaar.
• For accessible, practical coverage: Elle.
• For the business behind the clothes: Business of Fashion.
• For new designers, music and street style: i-D or Dazed.
• For society and the social calendar: Tatler.

Skip any magazine that cannot tell you, on its own website, who edits it and how often it appears. The better publishers state both, for example on Vogue UK and Dazed.

Choosing among the best fashion magazines

One more way to judge them is by the cover on the shelf, which tells you a surprising amount before you open the thing. Vogue ran its first colour photograph on a cover with the issue of 1 July 1932, a swimmer with a beach ball taken by Edward Steichen, and the choice to put a photograph on the front instead of an illustration settled the look of fashion magazines for decades. Read about the details in the Vogue guide.

A few practical judgements follow from everything above. If you want one title, take British Vogue. If you want a second, Harper’s Bazaar. Anyone working in or studying the trade should add Business of Fashion, and anyone who wants to know what comes next should add i-D or Dazed. Cosmopolitan, Grazia and Marie Claire are better treated as lifestyle reading than as authorities on fashion.

The directory of poetry magazines deals with a very different side of the newsstand, but the questions it asks are the same: who publishes, how often, and who for. The wider set of guides is on the magazines hub.