Less than a week before the start of New York’s Fashion Week, Time Inc. is pulling the plug on Time Style & Design, the publishing giant’s fashion quarterly.
Time blamed the collapse of the luxury market for the move.
“This really is a suspended publication,” said a spokeswoman of the one million-circulation magazine. “We’d hope to bring it back when the economy improves.”
Kate Betts, the one-time editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar who had been serving as the editor of Time Style & Design, will remain with the company and is expected to cover the shows for Time.
Four other staffers were let go.
Time Style & Design was unusual in that it tried to have an American and a European circulation base, in a bid to capture the eye — and ad dollars — of fashion designers in New York as well as in Paris, Milan and London.
About 550,000 subscribers were based in the US; 450,000 in Europe.
It marks the second time during the third quarter that Time Inc. has shut down a magazine.
Last month, the company closed Southern Accents, part of Time Inc.’s Southern Progress subsidiary.
Speculation has been building that further cutbacks will come this quarter, particularly in the News Division, where John Squires was removed as executive vice president and given a corporate job. Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore now oversees the unit.
Nail-ed
Former Met and disgraced investment adviser Lenny “Nails” Dykstra again has found himself in hot water.
Dykstra, who filed for bankruptcy in July, is being accused of taking a French stove worth an estimated $40,000 from his mansion just weeks before a bankruptcy judge named a trustee.
Index Investors, one of many creditors trying to collect on the All-Star player, claimed he removed a La Cornue stove, plus furnishings, fixtures and equipment, from the mansion in Thousand Oaks, Calif. that Dykstra bought from former hockey great Wayne Gretzsky.
The claim is the latest twist in Dykstra’s spec tacular fall. He once boasted of being worth $60 million from an empire built on financial advice, investments and magazine launches.
When he filed for bankruptcy, Dykstra listed assets of less than $50,000 and liabilities of as much as $50 million.
keith.kelly@nypost.com