Birthday time Click on left to find out how to download our latest Supplement.

It’s our birthday

We celebrate our 12th anniversary today—but you get the presents
Supplement cover photographed by Andrew Matusik
wallpapers photographed by Douglas Rimington/www.detunephotography.com

 

Wednesday’s Child Photographed by Douglas Rimington, styled by Sara Smeath, make-up and hair by Kaori Harigae, and modelled by Clemency/Chadwick Models 1024 × 768 | 1280 × 800 | 1280 × 960 | 1280 × 1024 | 1600 × 1200   BMW X6 5·0 1024 × 768 | 1280 × 800 | 1280 × 960 | 1280 × 1024 | 1600 × 1200   Audi A4 2·0T FSI 1024 × 768 | 1280 × 800 | 1280 × 960 | 1280 × 1024 | 1600 × 1200

TWELVE YEARS AGO, we sat in a small office in Welling­ton, New Zealand waiting to upload a file called index.htm to our server in Alexandria, Va., to a direc­tory called lucire, which would launch this public­ation. The countdown was till October 21, 1997, mid­night New Zealand Day­light Time. That equated to October 20, 1997, 6 A.M. EST in the US, or 11 A.M. GMT—and we never expected to change the fashion publish­ing scene. In fact, some cynics might say we haven’t. But in 1997, it was rare to go into online fashion publish­ing. We weren’t the first by a long shot—Lumière, which is still pub­lished, ruled the roost not long after its 1995 début. (Our L name, coined by Sylvie Poupard-Gould, is a co­incidence, and you’ll see from our trivia post in ‘Insider’ that we were almost called some­thing else.) In New Zealand, only Fashion­brat existed—the first online fashion maga­zine in the coun­try, published by what is now Massey Uni­versity. (It revised slightly in 1998, then dis­appeared.) And some­how, we found the oppor­tunity to go into print in 2004, initially in one country, then two by 2005, and a third in 2008. None of it has been easy. The last 12 years have seen ups (our launch day in 1997, our being first in the fashion indus­try to partner with the UNEP in 2003) and downs (you might have noticed the site not being updated much for a good part of 2006), to where we are today—hopefully find­ing the balance of balancing the demands of online and print publish­ing. The former remains our core, driving the print edi­tions—the exact opposite model to many of our compet­itors. In fact, quite a lot of things were done back­ward to convention­al think­ing at Lucire. Our logo is intention­ally made up of a sans serif type­face, because the establish­ment used serif ones. We ran longer articles online than in print, because we believed online readers wanted to bene­fit from the extra research. Maybe it’s a conse­quence of having started in New Zealand, where in­dependent thinking is the order of the day, as far as every­day Kiwis are con­cerned. Or maybe it’s due to a well balanced team, finally: one that has taken 12 years to emerge, but their talents shine through both online and off­line. To Summer Rayne Oakes, Samantha Hannah, Tanya Sooksom­batisatian, Elyse Glick­man, Stanley Moss and the rest of the Lucire team—this is a tribute to you. Whatever the case, today is our birthday. To share it with you, you can download our Supple­ment for free—you won’t even wind up on our mailing list for doing so. There’s a shoot that only readers of Twin­palms Lucire, our magazine in Thai­land, saw in print, taken by London-based Kiwi Camille Sanson, while the cover is by the talented Andrew Matusik. And at left are wall­papers photo­graphed by Douglas Rimington, and designed by Tanya Sooksom­batisatian. We raise our glasses not to us, but to you—readers who have sus­tained us all these years. We thank you for sticking with us, and we look forward to many more years ahead on this journey, with your company.—Jack Yan, Publisher

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