Condé Nast France wants to close down Glamour magazine

Condé Nast is planning to close down Glamour magazine in France. The publisher indicated its intentions speaking to French agency AFP on Wednesday, confirming the news published by the Mind Media newsletter.

“Following a painstaking assessment, Condé Nast France can confirm it intends to close down Glamour. The process will involve consultations with staff over a period of several months,” it said.

According to Mind Media, Condé Nast announced to its staff a plan for 25 collective redundancies for economic reasons, and that it was ceasing to collaborate with six regular external contributors. For the time being, the group declined to confirm any of these figures to AFP.

Glamour targets women aged 25 to 35 and was launched in France in 2004. To try to counter the crisis in women’s magazine publishing, in 2018 it switched to publishing bi-monthly issues, having published on an almost monthly basis before.

Sales did not pick up however, and in 2018 Glamour lost almost half of its circulation, falling to 120,000 copies, having already lost 20% in 2017, when it fell to 220,000 copies on average, according to ACPM.

Condé Nast has been struggling financially, and the paper editions of Glamour in the US and UK were ended in 2018 and 2017, replaced by online editions. In Italy, Glamour shut down in 2019.

In France, where Condé Nast publishes Glamour, Vogue, AD, Vanity Fair and GQ, the group’s revenue fell by 34% between 2015 and 2019, according to Mind Media.