One of Germany’s Biggest Newspapers to Collaborate With Indie Fashion Mag
In early June of this year, one of Germany’s longest-running indie fashion magazines will collaborate with one of the country’s best-known and most widely read newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, often colloquially referred to as the FAZ.
Celebrating Achtung magazine’s 20th birthday and the 10th birthday of the Frankfurter Allgemeine’s monthly lifestyle supplement, the collaboration involves an insert with a double cover. One cover will be typical of the more conservative newspaper’s regular lifestyle supplement, launched in 2013, and the other, a bolder, more creative look from Achtung’s editors.
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It may sound like an odd pairing but Achtung founder Markus Ebner said the two have more in common than one might expect.
“I’ve been working for FAZ as their chief stylist for about 10 years and as a fashion critic for the newspaper,” Ebner told WWD. While talking to the magazine’s editor, Alfons Kaiser, about the two anniversaries and considering the annual advertising drought during the European summer, “the idea of a collaboration was launched,” Ebner said. The split issue will come out on June 10.
For Achtung magazine and Ebner, this is, he said, “a dream come true. It gives us an opportunity to bring our content to a much wider audience. We’re going from 20,000 to up to 250,000,” he said.
In 2021 audits, the FAZ newspaper had a paid circulation of around 201,000 and readership estimated at over 880,000 in 2021.
And of course, Ebner conceded, FAZ’s own magazine would be hoping to expand their reach, too, especially with potential high-end advertisers who might usually prefer to pay for pages in more niche publications.
It is true that the readers who favor the different media are likely to be quite different from one another. But as Ebner explained, Achtung is developing content especially for this issue, without sacrificing their own handwriting.
Achtung’s first cover in 2003 featured model Karolína Kurkova and her grandmother and the 20th anniversary edition will feature similar cross-generational portraits and interviews, including of the former editor of Vogue Germany, Christiane Arp, and well-known German art collector, Karen Boros, who, in her 60s, modeled for Balenciaga. These local icons will be juxtaposed with the likes of an up-and-coming Turkish rapper, aged 19, and Ebner believes the mix of subject matter should appeal to everyone.
Ebner hopes it could be even more than that, though. He sees the collaboration as being similar to the way in which Gucci and Prada collaborated with Adidas. When they began, collaborations like that brought “some fresh air to the fashion industry,” he said. “In an age of shrinking circulation and smaller budgets, this could offer a new way forward, in publishing, too.”
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