Vogue Publisher Celebrates Remaining Financially Visible
Condé Nast’s UK arm reports a 36% profit drop, prompting a national celebration of still being technically solvent.
LONDON, Condé Nast’s UK arm reported a 36% fall in annual pre-tax profits, blaming higher restructuring costs. Its parent company also ruled out selling the publisher. Fashion industry figures took this as evidence that the business remains financially visible, much as a faint pencil mark remains visible if you tilt the paper.
The publisher has therefore completed another year without being bought, dissolved or turned quietly into an extremely expensive email newsletter. Analysts called it a solid showing in the crowded business of remaining available for accounting purposes.
“We are pleased to confirm that the company continues to exist, in the broadest interpretation of the word,” said Myrtle Quibble, deputy convenor of the Committee for Magazines That Have Not Yet Become Memories. “Our preliminary assessment is that the profits are somewhere in the building. They may be behind a restructuring cost.”
“This is not a turnaround. It is a tasteful refusal to disappear.”
The 36% decline was put down to rising restructuring costs. In practical terms, this appears to have involved rearranging deckchairs, repainting them, then commissioning a report into whether the deckchairs still matched the brand’s visual identity.
A person near a filing cabinet described the mood as “muted triumph”. Several professionals nodded at a spreadsheet, and one intern was allowed to open a window. There was no champagne. A bottle of mineral water was placed beside the figures, apparently in solidarity.
The parent company’s decision against a sale was read by the Institute of Immediate Non-Transactions as a firm intention to keep owning the business, at least until matters grow more complicated or somebody finds a profitable use for the word “premium”. The institute printed its findings on one sheet of paper and filed it under “encouraging”.
Vogue and the other titles are expected to carry on as usual, producing glossy pages while the financial machinery makes the sound of a printer trying to swallow a tie. “We have reached the unusual editorial position of being commercially challenged while still technically in the conversation,” said Professor Crispin Ledgerwell, chair of the fictional-sounding but entirely invented Centre for Surviving Another Financial Year. “This is not a turnaround. It is a tasteful refusal to disappear.”