Mademoiselle

» see mademoiselle.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The last thing Mademoiselle ever published under its own name was two sentences of customer service. Effective as of the November 2001 issue, Conde Nast Publications has suspended publication of Mademoiselle. If you are currently a subscriber to Mademoiselle, the balance of your subscription will be fulfilled by Glamour magazine, beginning January 2002. The browser title above it read Mademoiselle: Good-bye, hyphen included, which is how a magazine founded in 1935 spelled it.

Street & Smith started it that year as a title for young women who were working or about to be, and Condé Nast bought it in 1959. Betsy Blackwell ran it from 1937 to 1971 and built the thing it is remembered for, which was fiction. Mademoiselle printed Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Joyce Carol Oates, Ray Bradbury and Alice Munro, in a magazine sold next to the hemlines. The reading public has never quite believed this combination was possible and it was possible for about thirty years.

What ended it was ordinary. Condé Nast announced the closure on 1 October 2001, three weeks after the towers came down and the American advertising market went with them. Ninety-three staff went. Steven T. Florio, running the company, said that current economic conditions have produced a situation where, despite the excellent efforts of Mademoiselle's editorial and business staffs, the magazine is no longer viable. Subscribers were handed to Glamour, whose guaranteed circulation went up by a hundred thousand copies on the strength of it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the guest editors ~

The part of Mademoiselle that outlived Mademoiselle is the guest editor competition. Twenty young women were picked each year, brought to New York for a month, and put to work producing the August college issue. It was a real job with real bylines, run as a contest, and the alumni list is why the magazine has a literary reputation at all. Fern Mallis, who would go on to invent New York Fashion Week, was one of the twenty and the only one of her year asked to come back for a staff job.

Sylvia Plath entered the fiction contest in 1952, won five hundred dollars for a story called Sunday at the Mintons, and took the guest editorship the following summer. She spent the month in the Barbizon Hotel, went home, and the breakdown that followed became the first half of The Bell Jar. A magazine that no longer exists is read every year by teenagers who have no idea it was a real place, because the novel never names it. The Bell Jar has been in print continuously since 1963.

~ the last issue ~

The November 2001 issue reached newsstands as planned and is the end of the run. Mandi Norwood had been the editor for a year and a half, brought over from the British market with a brief to make the magazine younger and louder, and the repositioning never got time to work. Mademoiselle's problem by then was that it sat between Glamour, which Condé Nast also owned, and a generation of titles aimed at readers five years younger. Closing it was a line item in a very bad quarter.

~ what happened to the address ~

mademoiselle.com was live from 1998 and spent its last two years doing what magazine sites did then. The description tag sold forums rather than articles: Runway to Real-way, on translating designer looks into daily clothes, and Plan-it Hollywood, on getting a celebrity look for less. The homepage ran on CondéNet's ad server and stopped changing on 1 December 2001. By the middle of January the whole site had been replaced by the good-bye page, whose sidebar still carried the dropdown of Condé Nast titles, Swoon among them, the publisher's dating and relationships site, which had a far shorter run than the magazine did.

From 25 March 2002 the domain redirected to condenast.com, and it has never carried a magazine again. The name resolves today, on a Condé Nast address, and answers nothing at all on either port. That is the ordinary fate of a publisher's dead title: the domain does not get sold, it gets kept, and kept is not the same as alive.

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