Fashion Has a Story, and Plans to Shout It
By GINIA BELLAFANTE THE NY TIMES

An analyst for Bear Stearns, say, making his way home to Cos Cob or Scarsdale through Grand Central Terminal any night next week, might find his thoughts temporarily digressing from the solemn news surrounding fourth-quarter earnings. Distraction will come from images of young women blown up to many times their already Brobdingnagian size. Vogue magazine will install a giant screen in Vanderbilt Hall for the duration of Fashion Week, to deliver continual runway footage from the fall 2003 shows in Bryant Park to the 500,000 commuters every day.

"This is about taking the fashion industry to the people," Vogue's publisher, Thomas A. Florio, said. "The models will look as though they are walking through the logo of Vogue."

Although little on the world stage might suggest that the mass appetite for style news is growing, the monthlong collections that begin with the New York shows on Friday are the focus of unusually aggressive media attention.

Besides Vogue's Grand Central project, the magazine is producing five one-hour specials drawing from runway news, which will be shown over the coming months on syndicated television. In conjunction with Fashion Week, 600,000 of Time magazine's most affluent subscribers will receive a special style and design supplement along with the newsweekly next Monday. The special issue will be distributed twice a year; the first features Heidi Klum on the cover.

The motive behind Time's venture is to attract more luxury-goods advertisers to the weekly, Taylor Gray, an associate publisher, said. "Obviously the environment for this isn't as good as it was two years ago," Mr. Gray said, "but the hope is to develop relationships with these advertisers and lay the groundwork for when times are better."

Meanwhile, the Metro Channel's popular "Full Frontal Fashion" series, which already features saturation coverage of the New York shows, will travel for the first time to Milan and Paris for the European collections. Beginning in April, "Full Frontal Fashion" will expand beyond its New York City base to become a weekly program on the WE cable channel, with Ali Landry as host, which reaches 50 million viewers.

WE has made a weekly commitment to style coverage, the network's president, Martin von Ruden, said, "because companies like Revlon and L'Oréal expressed specific interest in fashion coverage on WE."

Perhaps in a sour economy, purveyors of clothes, beauty products and other comparative frivolities find they need to advertise more assertively, rather than less so.

Finally, as the ultimate captive audience for fashion and beauty marketers, the industry professionals attending the collections will find themselves besieged by even more coverage. The Time supplement will be distributed at Bryant Park, along with a gossip-filled daily magazine produced for showgoers by Us magazine, which made a successful debut last fall during the spring collections. Buyers and editors will also receive another publication, The Daily, produced by Seventh on Sixth, the official presenters of the New York shows.

Fern Mallis, director of Seventh on Sixth, said The Daily had little trouble finding advertisers. The paper will appear six times during Fashion Week with 101 pages of advertising from companies like Condé Nast, Redkin, Avon and Sony, she said.

"We've got thousands of people sitting and waiting for shows to start for 20 minutes to an hour with nothing," Ms. Mallis added. "We can give them something to do. This industry has a million stories."

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