THE fashion magazines are thundering down the home stretch toward closing their September issues — but it’s not looking pretty.
Rumors were circulating this week that Vogue, the perennial category leader and flagship of S.I. Newhouse Jr.‘s Condé Nast empire, will have a hard time producing a 500-page edition this September.
Vogue Publisher Tom Florio is making no final predictions, but did say, “We’ll have over 400 pages of advertising.”
He claims Vogue’s market share among high-end fashion, retail and beauty advertisers is up, even if the actual pages are down.
“We’re a profitable book,” he said. “Not as profitable as we were in 2007, but very profitable.”
September is always the make-or-break month for the fashion mags, but with the recession the outlook has been cloudy.
Complicating things for Vogue this year is the fact that the Fashion Rocks supplement — formerly championed by Richard Beckman and tied to a TV special and concert at Radio City Music Hall — was scrapped.
The supplement used to pump up ad pages across all the Condé Nast magazines that sent it to their subscribers as a value-added publication. This year, the ad-page loss is going to show up in September, making Condé’s ad picture look a lot worse in comparison to a year ago, when Rocks was still around.
Vogue’s biggest September issue ever was in 2007, when it ran an 840-page total issue with 727 ad pages. Last year, it slipped to 607 ad pages in September.
This year, through the July issues, Elle actually holds a slim lead over Vogue in total ad pages with 970, down 22 percent from a year ago. Vogue through July was at 956, down 32 percent.
It’s the first time ever that Elle has held first place this late in the season, but Elle senior vice president/chief brand officer Carol Smith isn’t doing a victory lap, as ads are coming in slowly.
“Everything is breathtakingly late,” said Smith.
Meanwhile, In Style, the Time Inc. entry, had 930.32 ad pages in its core magazine (excluding Weddings special) down 25 percent compared to a year ago.
Harper’s Bazaar was at 677 ad pages through July, down 29 percent. W, also owned by Condé Nast, tumbled 44 percent to 512 ad pages.
Bad timing
Everyone scrambles to be first with breaking news whenever a celebrity dies, but only the New York Daily News got the news out before Farrah Fawcett was actually dead.
Fawcett, the former star of “Charlie’s Angels,” died at about 12:28 p.m. New York time in Santa Monica, Calif.
But the sleuths at the media-centric Web site Gawker.com noticed that the first article on Fawcett’s death on the Daily News Web site had a time stamp of Thursday, June 25, 12:00 p.m. — about 28 minutes be fore she actually died.
It was later updated to 12:13 p.m., still 15 min utes before her passing.
Finally, it was amended again to 12:39 p.m.
Calls to Daily News Editor-in- Chief Martin Dunn and to a News spokeswoman were not returned.
Prestige, a new quarterly magazine produced by CR Media for the ultra-rich, still hasn’t found a publisher to replace Ray Chelstowski, who jumped ship to become publisher of Entertainment Weekly.
But they do have an exclusive interview with billionaire investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudia Arabia, for its second issue.
The Saudi royal has seen his fortune decline by an estimated $8 billion, or 40 percent, in the past year. One of the biggest beatings came from his stake in Citigroup, once valued as high as $7 billion, but now said to be worth under $700 million.
“The crisis has hit everyone,” Alwaleed is quoted as saying. “It’s hit nations, states, cities, individuals. The question now is how to manage the crisis and get out.”
And the global recession hasn’t stopped him from having big dreams, such as a $10 billion, mile-high tower he wants to start building soon in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah.
“Because it’s a down time, it’s a good time to build. Concrete prices are down. Steel is down 35 percent. Now is the time to build.”
Publishers’ in-boxes have been heating up the past few days with a book proposal from a Forbes magazine staffer who writes about discovering that her live-in boyfriend of 10 years had been secretly cheating on her with men.
Kiri Blakeley, a writer at Forbes Women, said that when she first heard of his concerns that he might be gay — just before their wedding date — she momentarily thought it was just her commitment-shy boyfriend getting cold feet.
But she quickly learned that he in fact had been cheating on her with men for most of their relationship.
Now she has turned it into a book proposal she’s entitled “Hard Wired: What My Gay Fiancé Taught Me About Sex, Love and Myself,” which has been getting a lot of interest around town in recent days.
“There were no hints,” she said of the devastating revelations. “You know, in hindsight, you look back and see little things and clues.”
But despite the emotional experience, Blakeley said it wasn’t difficult to write the memoir.
“It wasn’t tough,” she said. “It saved my life. I’d wake up at 4 a.m., my mind would be racing and I’d write for three hours before going to work.”
The proposal, from literary agent Jamie Brenner at Artists and Artisans, went out this week. keith.kelly@nypost.com