From the NY POST

Time magazine is jumping into the fashionista wars.

Its oversized Style & Design spinoff, with 1.34 million circulation worldwide, will appear twice this year, starting at next month's fashion week shows in New York and Europe.

It marks the latest effort in the heightened wars between Time Inc., the magazine division of embattled AOL Time Warner that's run by managing editor Jim Kelly and the Newhouse media empire, which owns Conde Nast, publisher of Vogue, and Fairchild, publisher of W and Women's Wear Daily.

"A lot of the ad community feels that Women's Wear Daily and W magazine have lost their edge," said Taylor Gray, Time's associate publisher for marketing, who is overseeing the Style & Design effort.

Gray sees W magazine as the most direct competitor. "We're trying to position ourselves between the trade and the consumer," he said.

The idea is obviously to get fashion advertisers interested in Time, which is not usually a top spot. But Gray said he will not serve up softball coverage just to lure advertising. "We'll take our lumps with it, too," said Gray. "We won't pull punches the way the fashion magazines are said to do."

The magazine grew out of a European Style & Design special issue that appeared twice in Europe last year, overseen by London-based fashion editor Lauren Goldstein.

She will oversee the fashion shoots and editorial for the new editions as well. Time senior editor Belinda Luscombe, an Australian-born journalist married to an architect, will top-edit the magazine in New York.

Only a year ago, Luscombe was wooed by Bonnie Fuller at Us Weekly. Luscombe stayed put, and is now being used to try to counter some of the buzz that Us Weekly made at last year's fashion shows with its own Us Fashion Daily.

About 20,000 copies of Style & Design will be distributed at Fashion Week in New York, which gets under way on Feb. 7. Time Inc. will also send 600,000 copies of the new Style & Design version in a polybag to the wealthiest U.S. subscribers to Time and sister publication In Style, plus 500,000 copies to Europe and another 240,000 copies in Asia.

Instead of publishing on the thin, opaque paper used in regular weekly editions of Time, the Style & Design team will try to produce a more lavish magazine to appeal to fashionistas.

It will have what is known in the trade as an 80-pound stock cover and inside will use a 60-pound body stock - normally what Time uses for its cover.