How ‘Perfect’ Makes Magazines Work

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Last week, Lily Allen returned to pop music with a brutal, vivid concept album — her first in seven years — chronicling the breakdown of a marriage presumably inspired by her own. The internet has been going wild for the album’s nakedly confessional storytelling, with lyrics featuring lurid details like finding a Duane Reade bag full of sex toys at the garçonniere her partner was passing off as his “dojo.”

Perfect magazine, the title founded by Katie Grand following her 2020 exit from Love, has been all over it. Perfect released an editorial timed to the launch shot by Morgan Maher and styled by Daniel Gaines. The shoot — including lingerie-inspired pieces and masks from Valentino, Moschino, Gucci and more that were a perfect fit for the album’s intimate tone — went up alongside an interview by Alex Bilmes and social media sliders highlighting instantly-viral quotes from the lyrics.

Perfect printed a fan zine and posters, and organised a signing party with Allen at Marc Jacobs’ Book Marc space at The Standard hotel. The event was splashed across the Daily Mail within hours as interest in the album’s dramatic backstory heated up.

It’s the latest example of how Perfect is managing to cut through the noise in a saturated media climate. A line-up of collectible zines (six of them this year) has reinforced the title’s positioning at the intersection of pop culture and fashion, allowing it to grow circulation profitably and expand its online footprint beyond the reach of its twice-yearly fashion book.

Perfect has already followed-up its Lily Allen coup with another zine released Wednesday: a 60-page editorial on A$AP Rocky, shot by Rafael Pavarotti.

“What we’ve learned is when you align yourself with talent that has a proper fan base, and you give them a space to do something new, people listen,” Grand says. “It works on both sides: the talent has their fan bases, but so do photographers like Nadia Lee Cohen and Rafael [Pavarotti].”

Grand and I were a bit turned around — in the bowels of Paris’ Shangri-La Hotel looking for a place to catch up after the Miu Miu show earlier this month. Perfect had just celebrated five years in business — all of them profitable, Grand says, in line with her vision for a light, reactive magazine.

“I’m not a big five-year planner. And the fashion industry moves so quickly, in the end I think it’s better not to be,” she says.

“Every year has been very different — we were doing a lot of brand consulting in the early months, now it’s a lot of parties. The business is small and agile, so we can bring in the right people for each project, whether it’s a Rocky shoot, or a dinner for Frieze Masters in London.”

The “right people” has included a savvy cast of outsider-insiders who knew fashion’s inner workings, but were eager for the chance to reposition their ideas in a glossy magazine context. There’s editor-in-chief Bryan Yambao, who rose to prominence as a blogger and influence; designer and editor Ed Buchanan; and Rihanna’s creative director Jahleel Weaver.

The Rocky zine was a test of Grand and her team’s agility. After going back-and-forth on timing for months, “I was on a sun lounger at the Pellicano Hotel, and I get a phone call from Amanda Silverman [the star publicist] saying, can you shoot Rocky on Monday in LA? And it’s Thursday,” Grand says. She said yes. Then promptly knocked over a bottle of Perrier, frying her phone.

Luckily she had memorised the number for her publishing director Soraya Lamari, who was able to feed her some key contacts. Soon, she and Pavarotti were on their way to Los Angeles and Rocky’s stylist Matt Henson was pulling looks. Dior raced over samples from Jonathan Anderson’s debut. Call it a Grand adventure: “We kept waiting for something to go wrong, and it didn’t,” she says.

Most magazines have long since clamped down on this sort of last-minute shenanigan, with cover credits and key looks planned out (and commercialised) well in advance. Otherwise the expense would need to be paid off by shooting even more content to sell ads against.

But after working for 30 years at titles including Dazed, Pop and Love, Perfect is the first time a magazine has belonged to Grand outright. She’s the one who ultimately gets to say yes. “I knew everything I’d done had made money, so I started to think at some point I should really back myself.”

She keeps the overhead low, then cobbles together financing for projects on an ad hoc basis — often activating the talents’ relationships as well as her own. Rocky used a contract day with Ray-Ban. Selena Gomez wore Adidas. Then there’s the actual sales, averaging 5,000 copies per zine, priced at £25 ($32) each.

This year’s zines have editions with Kim Kardashian, Kate Moss and Miley Cyrus in addition to Allen and A$AP Rocky. Fame isn’t enough to start a conversation. But luckily, people don’t typically call on the legendary stylist and her crew “to look pretty in a pretty dress,” she says. “What’s great when you work with Rocky, Rihanna, or Miley is they all want to do something new.” (For Rocky, it was to do a shoot that was all about hair: changing from a James Brown-esque coif to a Rihanna-inspired look, another in curlers. )

Revenue is up, thanks to having more issues because of the zines, more chances to host a sponsored event tied to each one’s release. The brand’s Instagram following surpassed 500,000 this year, up 68 percent versus last year, Perfect said. Still, what the next five years of the magazine will look like is anyone’s guess.

“The aim of doing Perfect was to do things in a much more free way,” Grand says. “I like shooting editorials. I like consulting for brands, I like hosting parties — I’m sure we’ll do more of them."