WordPress has summarized the year of this news section, and told us something we know already: that our story on Marine Lorphelin being crowned Miss France 2013 was the biggest of the year. This also correlates with our Facebook fan page numbers.
   It also put France as one of the top countries accessing Lucire during December, though the United States remains number-one for our entire website. New Zealand, the UK and Australia were consistently in the top five each month.
   Last year, we did some quick arithmetic on the interest in Miss France versus its rival pageant, Miss Prestige National. In 2010, the ratio of readers for our Miss France story versus our Miss Nationale one was 2·7: that means, of Lucire readers, nearly three times as many were interested in Miss France than Miss Nationale. Last year, the ratio rose to 8·6. This year, however, the ratio is at 35·6 for Miss France versus Miss Prestige National—not great news for Geneviève de Fontenay and her committee, though if their online viewing numbers are healthy, then their sponsors will continue backing them.
   Our second most-read article was on We’ll Take Manhattan, and the interest in Bailey and Jean Shrimpton because of the BBC TV movie starring Karen Gillan and Aneurin Barnard earlier this year.
   The passing of Whitney Houston netted a lot of interest globally, and our article on celebrities paying tribute to her came in at number three.
   Interestingly, our Miss France 2012 article came in the top 10, as did a story on the Duchess of Cambridge wearing a dress by New Zealand-born designer Emilia Wickstead in May. A 2011 story on Keira Knightley modelling for Chanel Coco Mademoiselle also showed up in our top 10, making Knightley our most searched-for celebrity this year. Oscar winners Meryl Streep and Jean Dujardin appear after our top 10, in 13th place.
   The formula remains similar, with pageants, celebrity and royalty gaining the most public interest.
   As noted on our Tumblr, a number of countries were absent from our readership this year. This includes numerous African states such as South Sudan, Liberia and Lesotho, where fashion is hardly a priority with daily struggles, and Turkmenistan, where the state still has a say on what is and what is not permitted. One reader pointed out that in our map, Kosovo was also missing from our reader countries.
   As to our latest articles, pop to the main part of the site, where our Paris editor Lola Saab has her spring 2013 must-haves from New York.

It was uncharacteristically quiet in the news pages in Lucire on Monday, for a very good reason: the release of issue 29 in print and PDF.
   The latest issue features Laura Vandervoort (Smallville, V, Ted) on the cover, photographed by Courtney Dailey, styled by Lei Phillips, with make-up by Jamie Dorman and hair by Shaina Schow. And if you’re following us on Twitter, you will have seen the buzz this cover decision has generated, with Vandervoort herself telling her fans about it.
   Other stories in this issue include Sarah MacKenzie’s examination on the power of WAGs (everyone from Irina Shayk to Cheryl Cole) in the fashion world, Jack Yan’s report on the Brancott Estate World of Wearable Art’s 2012 show, the history of perfumes as Geneviève Hole visits the International Fragrance Museum in Grasse—plus the most exclusive, trendy scents on offer. David Machowski travels Route 66, Tiffany Fernando looks at the spring–summer 2013 trends, and Sopheak Seng interviews the ladies from Surface Too Deep. Plus there are outstanding shoots from John Sayer-White, Amanda Bruns, Dirk Bader, Dorit Thies, Louise Hatton, and TJ Manou. You can have a look at the full table of contents, as well as some preview spreads, here.
   The print edition is available now on demand from Vertia, which you can order via our site here. Scopalto has also put the PDF on sale, via its website. Our Ipad and Android apps will be out later this week via Magzter—we’re waiting for Apple to approve the Ipad one as a routine matter. Watch this space, or join up to our Facebook page to find out when it’s ready.

I’ve written so many editorials about Lucire’s history for our various anniversaries that now we’ve turned 15, I feel like I’d just be going over old ground. Again. I’d do it maybe for the 20th or 21st, but the story has been told online and in print many times.
   But 15 is a bit more of an occasion than, say, the ninth—so it deserves some recognition. The biggie this week is not so much that we have turned 15, but that we have officially announced a print-on-demand edition to complement our others in print and online, one that sees Lucire printed off as it’s ordered. It combines what we know—the digital world—with an analogue medium that everyone understands. It also gets around that sad reality that for every 1,000 copies printed, 500 usually wind up getting returned due to being unsold and pulped. In publishing, two-thirds sold qualifies as having “sold out”. And that’s not really that great for the first fashion magazine that the United Nations Environment Programme calls an industry partner.
   We’re also celebrating the Ipad and Android editions, which actually launched in August but we didn’t get an announcement out till September. We also débuted a PDF download via Scopalto in France, and there’s one more edition that we’ll announce before the year is out.
   So rather than look back—which is what we found ourselves doing at the 10th anniversary, at a time when the recession was about to bite and there was just an inkling of a fear that our best days were behind us—we’re now looking forward with some relish and wondering just how these new editions will play out.
   If I were to take a look back to 1997, it would be to remark that being the first (at least for New Zealand) does not necessarily translate to being the most profitable. You carve out a niche that no one else had done before, prove a point, and someone else makes it work a bit better. So is the lesson in commerce.
   It used to bug me but no more; we have a good record of doing things in a pioneering fashion, and when you look at Lucire, it’s one of the very few fashion titles from the original dot-com era that’s still being published today, and in more forms than we had imagined. We were always happy to put value labels right next to pricier ones in coverage or in editorials, because that is how real people dress, and because we based our coverage on merit rather than advertising budgets. We looked at the advertising market at a global, rather than regional, level, something which we see some agencies taking advantage of as greater convergence happens in that market.
   I like to think that some day, all magazines will be printed as we’re doing them, but from more bases around the world, to alleviate the burden on our resources. They’ll be, as I predicted many years back, mini, softcover coffee-table books, publications to covet, and be less temporary. (I also said newspapers will become more like news magazines, but I live in a city where dailies are still printed as broadsheets, which reminds me that predictions can often take a lot longer to be realized.) Features will dominate ahead of short-term, flash-in-the-pan news, a path which the 28th New Zealand-produced Lucire issue takes, and something foreshadowed by Twinpalms Lucire in Thailand five years ago.
   We’re also in a very enviable position with a cohesive team. You could say it’s taken us 15 years to find them. At 1 p.m. local time on October 20—15 years and one hour after we launched—our London team met to toast our 15th anniversary, while fashion editor Sopheak Seng, Louise Hatton, Michael Beel and Natalie Fisher worked on a photo shoot today in New Zealand for issue 29. Around the world, our team continues to deliver regular content, and I hope they’ll forgive me for not naming everyone as I fear accidental omissions. Just as I felt a little uncertain but excited about where things would lead with Lucire on October 21, 1997–the 20th in the US—I have a similar feeling today. And that’s a good thing, because if we’ve managed to get on the radars of millions in those last 15 years, I’m hopeful of the changes we can effect in the next 15.—Jack Yan, Publisher

Above Lucire copies get finished at Vertia Print in Lower Hutt.

Captain Catan, under Creative Commons Attribution 3·0

Anna Piaggi, the famed Italian fashion writer and editor, has passed away, aged 81.
   Piaggi had written for Vogue Italia and created the Italian magazine Vanity, with Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, Karl Lagerfeld and Manolo Blahnik among her many fans.
   Piaggi was born in Milano in 1931 and initially worked as an au pair, so she could learn new languages and travel. She met her husband, the photographer Alfa Castaldi, to whom she remained married till his death in 1995. Her first contact in publishing was at Mondadori, where she began working as a translator. She turned to fashion journalism in the 1960s, and later became fashion editor of Arianna, which saw her travel regularly to London, meeting David Bailey and Vern Lambert.
   She began writing for Vogue in 1970, and subsequently worked on Vanity Fair, Panorama, and L’Espresso. Lagerfeld, whom she and Castaldi met around this time, was so inspired by her that he made over 250 sketches of her in her days in Paris in the 1970s, publishing them in Lagerfeld’s Sketchbook: Karl Lagerfeld’s Illustrated Fashion Journal of Anna Piaggi.
   Piaggi was an avid collector of fashion, especially the more flamboyant designs, later exhibited in 2006 by the Victoria & Albert Museum. The exhibition, called Fashion-ology, was named after a term that Piaggi herself coined, its meaning approximating that of the Zeitgeist but specifically dealing with fashion. She adopted a cheerful stance toward fashion, able to detect its drama as well as its humour, making her particularly sought-after as a muse by many fashionistas, including milliner Stephen Jones. Piaggi popularized vintage fashion when it was hardly talked about among fashion circles. Her ‘D. P. Doppie Pagine di Anna Piaggi’—the double-pages in Vogue Italia with words, images and ideas—were famed collages that documented her fashion-ology that were irreverent and intellectual at the same time. The layouts were by Luca Stoppini, and showed Piaggi’s own enjoyment of typographic design alongside her love of fashion.
   Piaggi published her first book, Fashion Algebra, in 1998, a collection of her DPs, collages and spreads in Vogue Italia. In her lifetime, Piaggi produced over 7,000 editorial pages, according to one source.
   She passed away at her home in Milano.

Downstage’s brand is one of participation: look back through the theatre’s history and it’s been about innovation and democratization. The clue’s even in the name.
   Live at Six, the new production currently on at Downstage, embodies its ethos beautifully. Theatregoers are expected to bring their smartphones to film an incident that takes place in the half-hour drinks before the play kicks off, with the footage then incorporated into the story, kicking off the plot.
   Originally performed at Bats Theatre in 2009, Live at Six, by Leon Wadham and Dean Hewison, has been enhanced and brought bang up-to-date, with people encouraged to live-Tweet, and two of the actors actually editing images and video from the night live on stage while delivering the lines in the script.
   At no time are you really distracted, in an age when we are used to screensavers and video projections, by the glimpses of Adobe Première on background screens, because the Wadham and Hewison script is genuinely funny, delivered with plenty of panache thanks to Conrad Newport’s direction. The technological side—which is very clever, thanks to the likes of Hamish Guthrey, Stu Foster and Johann Nortje—never overwhelms proceedings.
   Skype calls, YouTube clips, TV1 and TV3 news bulletins and the like are worked in to a story that is very much of our times: how a disgraced anchorwoman on TV1 becomes the subject matter for TV3, interested in ratings and skirting the grey area of ethics and putting TV1 on the defensive.
   Jessica Robinson has the most work to do, with her role of TV1 anchor Jane Kenyon starting in the pre-show drinks, while Nick Dunbar carries off his quieter Derek Fontaine character very ably. Dunbar gets the prize for the subtlety in the way he carries out his role, though particular mention must be given to Tim Spite as TV3 talking head Gordon Miller—Live at Six’s own Ted Baxter, faking reaction shots for a television interview as though he were participating in a male fashion shoot.
   While there was plenty of entertainment and humour—and lots of colourful language—Live at Six still prompts one to think about how the media portray and distort events. Through satire, Live at Six itself creates its own versions of the culture of the two networks and even of some of the other players in the New Zealand media space, such as Stuff.
   This run of Live at Six concludes April 28 at Downstage, 12 Cambridge Terrace, Wellington.—Jack Yan, Publisher

In entertainment news today, Russell Brand and Katy Perry have parted in an amicable fashion, according to reports.
   Perry signed her divorce documents with her trade-mark smiley face, while Brand is not making any claim on his ex-wife’s fortune. The couple did not have a prenuptial agreement.
   Forbes had reported that between May 2010 and May 2011, Perry had made $44 million, while Brand made $7 million.
   The couple were married for 14 months.
   Meanwhile, So Solid Crew’s MC Harvey has backtracked over his claim in a Now interview that he had had a relationship with Britain’s sweetheart, Cheryl Cole.
   Cole then launched into a Twitter argument with Harvey after reading the interview.
   Since lawyers have been involved, Harvey has stated on Choice FM that the relationship was email-based but had never happened offline.
   He told DJ Max, ‘I will 100 per cent say that we had a communication relationship, but have I been out with her? No I haven’t.’
   Cole is now suing Now. A statement reads, ‘Cheryl Cole has today commenced legal proceedings in London against the publishers of Now magazine as a result of its two articles about her alleged “secret romance” with Michael Harvey.
   ‘Cheryl’s lawyers have asked to see Mr Harvey’s alleged emails which the magazine says are “proof” of the “romance” but it claims not to have them in its possession. Mr Harvey’s claims are denied by Cheryl and she looks forward to seeing both him and the magazine in Court at the very earliest opportunity.’

Never believe ‘sources close to’ in media, those well meaning folk who use their own constructs to read a situation—or those who simply invent gossip to fuel their importance. We’re not exactly falling for the news that there is an Ashley and Cheryl Cole reconciliation, even if the footballer was seen attending his ex-wife’s 28th birthday party at the Sanderson Hotel in London’s West End.
   An image of Cheryl Cole, with her new-look blonde bob, wearing a Stella McCartney dress and cutting her cake, can be seen in the report below.
   Ashley Cole, freshly flown in from New York, attended the party for four hours. Cheryl’s publicist has confirmed his attendance.
   Other guests included Will.i.am, Fergie, Tulisa Consto­stavlos, Nicola Roberts and Kimberley Walsh.
   Our view: exes showing up at parties is not a sign of reconcilation, but the British tabloids love speculation and their ‘sources’. So far, it’s only the tabloids who are providing detail from unnamed ‘guests’. The analysis of their careful wording is proving more interesting than the story itself.

David X. Prutting/Billy Farrell Agency

Lady Gaga loves to shock, and she did so again at the CFDA awards at the Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center in New York on Monday night. Donning a turquoise wig and enormous platform heels—which made it so hard to walk she literally needed support—Gaga accepted the Fashion Icon Award from V magazine editor-in-chief Stephen Gan.
   She had been accompanied to the awards by her parents, Joseph and Cynthia Germanotta.
   Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez for Proenza Schouler took home the Womenswear Designer of the Year award, presented by Naomi Watts, wearing Calvin Klein. Michael Bastian won Menswear Designer of the Year, presented by Gerard Butler. Alexander Wang won the Accessory Designer of the Year Award, presented by Iris Apfel.
   Karolína Kurková, wearing Diane von Furstenberg, presented the three Swarovski Awards, promoting emerging talent, to Prabal Gurung (womenswear), Robert Geller (menswear) and Eddie Borgo (accessories).
   The Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Marc Jacobs by Sofia Coppola.
   Other award winners included Phoebe Philo of Céline (International Award, presented by Kanye West), Hal Rubenstein of InStyle (the Founder’s Award, established in memory of CFDA founder Eleanor Lambert, presented by Jessica Alba), Hilary Alexander of The Daily Telegraph (Media Award, created in honour of Eugenia Sheppard, presented by Michael Kors), and photographer Arthur Elgort (Board of Directors’ Special Tribute Award, presented by Vogue’s Grace Coddington).
   The Geoffrey Beene Design Scholarship winner Lauren Sehner, the Liz Claiborne Fashion Scholarship winner Yejun Lu, and the CFDA–Teen Vogue Scholarship, in partnership with Target, winner Amanda Gyuran were acknowledged by CFDA executive director Steven Kolb. Kolb also announced a new scholarship programme with Gilt Groupe.
   Other celebrities at the awards included Miranda Kerr, looking sexy in a black dress, while Liv Tyler appeared in Proenza Schouler, and Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour in Marc Jacobs.
   Alba wore a neon orange and purple Diane von Furstenberg, disguising her baby bump. Other celebs caught in the segment below included Marcia Cross, in a Pamella Roland jumpsuit; and Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen in the Row and Chanel respectively.
   CNN anchor Anderson Cooper MCed the event. It was underwritten by Swarovski, for the tenth consecutive year. QVC was the official red carpet sponsor.
   CFDA president Diane von Furstenberg, Adam Kimmel, Adam Lippes, Aerin Lauder, Alejandro Ingelmo, Alexander Wang, Alexis Bittar, Aymeline Valade, Behati Prinsloo, Betsey Johnson, Brad Goreski, Chanel Iman, Chloë Sevigny, Chris Benz, Cynthia Rowley, Daphne Guinness, David Neville, Derek Lam, Donna Karan, Doutzen Kroes, Erin Fetherston, Francisco Costa, Georgina Chapman, Guinevere van Seenus, Inez van Lamsweerde, Italo Zucchelli, Jason Wu, Jeff Halmos, Jenna Lyons, Joseph Altuzarra, Kenneth Cole, Keren Craig, Lisa Mayock, Liya Kebede, L’Wren Scott, Maggie Rizer, Marcus Wainwright, Michael Bastian, Michael Kors, Nadja Swarovski, Nicole Miller, Pamela Love, Patrick Robinson, Patrik Ervell, Phillip Lim, Rachel Roy, Reed Krakoff, Richard Chai, Richard Lambertson, Sam Shipley, Sessilee Lopez, Simon Spurr, Sophie Buhai, Sophie Theallet, Stan Herman, Tory Burch, Tracy Reese, Vera Wang, Vinoodh Matadin, Yeohlee Teng, Waris Ahluwalia, Yigal Azrouel and Zac Posen were also in attendance.
   VIPs included Amber Heard, Ashley Greene, Carla Gugino, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Estelle, Joy Bryant, Kathy Griffin, Katie Cassidy, Kelly Rowland, Kerry Washington, Leelee Sobieski, Leigh Lezark, Lucy Liu, Matt Bomer, Nate Berkus, Russell Simmons, Shenae Grimes, and Thomas Mars.