In the Fray
By AMY FINNERTY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

She's often remote and occasionally moody. She devotes slavish attention to her hair and wardrobe, but might go out in midwinter with exposed legs. She has been known to wear dark glasses indoors and is entirely too thin. I get the uneasy feeling she's a lot smarter than I am. I'm not describing the average teenage girl, but the reputedly icy, undoubtedly rigorous Vogue magazine editor, Anna Wintour.

Conde Nast now plans to expand Ms. Wintour's already hegemonic sphere of aesthetic influence, vaunting her as a mentor to the backpack-and-low-rise-denim set with its launch of Teen Vogue, where she will serve as editorial director. But if hauteur, shopping acumen and label consciousness are the measures, Ms. Wintour may finally have met her match.

In terms of strategy, Teen Vogue, which hits the newsstands nationally on Jan. 28, would seem to have little in common with its juvenile-market predecessors -- publications like Seventeen and YM, which dedicate ample space to romance quizzes and warm-fuzzy features. In the crowded, hormonal world of teen periodicals, PMS and one's first kiss may be what passes for journalistic heft, but such topics don't really have a place in the chilly corridors of high fashion.

Rather, Vogue will train its fledgling market to focus, without needless sentiment or intellectual curiosity, on what it considers the substantive issues: clothes and cosmetics. In other words, Teen Vogue will be a Minor League training camp for a new generation of high-end consumers. With any luck, they will graduate to Major League Vogue and its obscenely expensive fashions before reaching the age of consent (or developing unwanted hips).

During their time in the minors, these young shoppers will be urged to consider cheaper variations on the Prada and Gucci that they can't (quite) yet afford. The average pre-college teen has money to spend but no living costs, which adds up to a lot of medium-range lip gloss and tank tops, even after accounting for the price of Pringles and CDs.

Teen Vogue itself, with a cover price of $1.50, won't be much of a drain on teen budgets. And it's in a smaller format than its big-boned older sister, only 6 3/4 inches by 91/8 inches, with 80 advertising pages in its launch issue, compared with the grownup's hundreds.

But it's difficult to imagine that a fashion spread in junior Vogue will diverge much from, say, the one in January's adult Vogue, with the headline "Cute Suit: The Miraculous Classic Morphs to Minuscule." In it, a blonde in a teensy Chanel tweed number thrusts out her backside, a la J-Lo. Needless to say, it's not the sort of thing you'd wear to work at an accounting office (or, for that matter, a school dance).

On the following page, a suspiciously girlish-looking woman wearing even less hugs a Chanel surfboard, and, further on, "bohemian glamour" is exemplified by Sandra Bullock in faded -- and unbuttoned -- denim, paired with a peasant top. The grainy, soft-focus spread looks remarkably like something from a 1970s teen magazine -- or maybe an ad for musk -- and, indeed, seems like it might have sprung directly from the imagination of a mall-hardened ninth-grader.

Perhaps more tellingly, that same issue of Vogue runs an ad for Biore Pore Strips. These "deep cleaning" strips, sold in drugstores, have enjoyed a certain, well, vogue among schoolgirls recently. If you see a preteen girl walking down the street with what appears to be a bandage on her nose, she has probably placed her faith in the "Pore Target System" that "works like a magnet" to extract impurities in the battle against zits. But most of the kids will probably tire of this fad some time in the next 45 seconds or so, maybe even before the adults have had a chance to try the product.

Which leads to the question: Who is the real fashion role model here, the Conde Nast editor, or the girl? The average 13-year-old of my acquaintance courses through a dozen fashion trends before the average fashion editor finishes her morning Soy-Chai-Latte. (If Conde Nast thinks it invented the whole plaid-is-subversive thing, it should send a photographer to the Upper East Side of Manhattan to see what girls are doing with their school uniforms this season.)

Abercrombie & Fitch, for those adults who didn't get the memo, was already losing its magical cachet last year, according to my middle-school sources. The moment for other piping-hot brands will have passed before we know they've arrived. As of this afternoon, pre-teens I've asked are longing for logo-free basics and wouldn't be caught dead with little quilted handbags, shoes with bows or oversized shades. They want classic, one-inch-above-the-knee dresses to wear to bar mitzvahs, and will consider wearing flared corduroys as long as they hang down over unlaced sneakers. And all this will change tomorrow.

Conde Nast may be facing its most critical -- and mercurial -- readership yet, but young teens will almost certainly buy the magazine the minute they see "Girl" on the cover. If they don't treat it as a fashion bible, they'll enjoy getting together and leafing through the latest issue en masse, by turns conferring group approval and sneering at the outfits that "just so don't work."