The good, the bad, and the ad. What’s good over bad advertising though? Is it the advertisement that creates a trend? The one that gets the most views? Or is it the one that whispers, where everyone else is shouting? My money is on the latter. In life, there’s traditional, there are people who want to become traditional, and there are the people who just want to be heard. But traditional, as we know it, is synonymous with timeless, and timeless is well… Timeless. I’m a big magazine reader. The newsstand vendor on my street knows that when I come in, it’s not just to browse. I get my magazines (plural), I go home, I get changed, and I flip through pages and pages of thin laminated paper. Now, one thing that always gets me is how many ad pages there are, especially in fashion magazines. And while that is the timeless thing I was referring to earlier, and I wouldn’t want it any other way, I do wonder why there are there, and why there are more of them than shoes in my closet.
Plot twist! Fashion magazines are the one, the only, the anti-marketing tool. They’re not about selling a product, per se, they’re about selling the idea of exclusivity through restraint. Where you see a click-bait video for a faux leather bag, they see a frenzy not worth participating in. The world consumes fast, and fast-consumption strategies are all the talk, but the right brands with the right ads in the right places dominate, because silence is golden, and so is a full-page ad in a fashion magazine. Unlike social media’s desperate bazaar of ‘like me, follow me, please engage,’ paper ads have all the rights to just exist. They’re not there to chase your attention; they’re there to remind you, quietly but unmistakably, that this brand doesn’t need to shout. It’s not a sales pitch - it’s a velvet rope. If you belong, you’ll come. If not? Well, that sounds like a personal issue.
Let’s play a game. You have a brand of say, jewelry. What would you rather? A (fleeting) moment of viral success, or a full-page ad in the latest issue of a big-name magazine? If you said the viral success, come in, leave your shoes at the door, and let’s talk some more. Viral success, while it is gratifying, has nothing on a full-page ad. They’re the promise of something deeper. Something slower, something more deliberate. I mean, it has been on my coffee table for years, it’s right there! Grab it!
I’ve talked about the lifestyle luxury brands, in other words, brands that are in said full-page ads, sell you. I’ll catch you up - essentially, brands aren’t selling you handbags, they’re selling the illusion of a life we’re dying to live, with just enough exclusivity to make us beg for more. It’s all about creating a “lifestyle” that feels exclusive, relatable, and just out of reach, enough to keep you swiping your credit card in the name of authenticity. But this - this whole fashion marketing and selling, in its most basic form, is about being - not doing. And the ads just prove that. They don’t chase you down or demand your attention like a clingy date - they simply exist, offering a moment of arrival, of being. It’s not a quick fix; it’s an investment, a quiet reflection. And let’s be real - that’s what makes it timeless, priceless, or whatever you want to call it.
Timeless because that one ad from The Wall Street Journal still pops up on my Pinterest feed every day of the week and all day Sunday (you know which one I’m talking about), and I figured I wanted a Porsche 911 from - say it with me - an ad from 1992. When you hold the September issue of the biggest fashion magazine known to mankind, you’re not just holding 300 pages of glossy paper, you’re holding a physical artifact of culture, something that can’t be replicated by a click. And while everyone loves to love digitalization, luxury brands know that true value is found in the tangible - the real, the concrete, the enduring, and other synonyms found on Thesaurus.com. It’s a reminder that some things are meant to be experienced slowly, savored. An ad in a publication doesn’t just sell a product - it sells a moment, a legacy, an icon, that will surely be revisited time and time again, and called vintage in about 40 years.
So, while influencers are busy selling their souls and affiliate links, luxury brands are selling you the dream - without the filter. And I promise, I’m not trying to get my nostalgia everywhere, but the ads that we look up to today will inevitably be the ads that our grandchildren will look up to. They’re gonna be that whisper of perfume on a collar, the last line of a poem you can’t seem to remember, the sound of a champagne flute clinking, just loud enough to be noticed. All this to say, you don’t need to rush, don’t need to push - you just need a full-page print ad in a magazine. Now good luck getting it, I’ll be here rooting for you!
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