Harper's Bazaar

• 1. Introduction

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  Harper's Bazaar first appeared on newsstands on the 2nd of November 1867, making it the oldest fashion magazine still operating anywhere in the world. It began not as a glossy luxury object but as a folio tabloid, published weekly with the subtitle "A Repository of Fashion, Pleasure, and Instruction." The man who set it in motion was Fletcher Harper, who saw promise in bringing the German publication Der Bazar to American readers. His brothers James and Joseph initially pushed back, arguing they were already stretched thin running Harper's Monthly and Harper's Weekly. Then Fletcher announced he would publish it himself. That was enough to change their minds.

  From that fraternal negotiation in 1867 to its current 31 editions spanning six continents, the story of Harper's Bazaar is one of reinvention, rivalry, and a recurring question: what is fashion actually for? The answers, as the magazine's editors discovered one by one, kept changing.

• 2. Mary Booth and the Early Edge

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  Mary Louise Booth edited the first issue herself and held that post until her death in 1889. Under her watch, the magazine quietly carved out space for women's rights in an era when that was not the expected territory of a fashion publication. Booth herself denied any political agenda, but later observers described her Bazar as a "covert" voice for women's suffrage and equal rights.

  The magazine's competitive edge in those years had nothing to do with editorial courage alone. Through its partnership with Der Bazar, Harper's received the original electrotypes of printing plates directly from the German publication. Other American magazines, like Godey's Lady's Book and Peterson's, had to re-engrave their own copies of European fashion illustrations. Harper's Bazar published the same images at the same time as the European journals, months ahead of its domestic rivals. Circulation estimates from the first six weeks reached somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 copies.

  Early contributors included Wilkie Collins, Virginia Woolf, and George Eliot, as well as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who wrote Women and Men for the magazine. The Paris correspondent, Emmeline Raymond, kept the magazine connected to the source of fashion authority. By 1901, the financial strain of weekly publishing had become too great, and the magazine shifted to a monthly format.

• 3. Hearst Takes Over

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  William Randolph Hearst purchased Harper's Bazar in 1913, at a moment when the magazine had been losing money steadily for years. The acquisition transformed the publication from a Harper & Brothers house organ into a thick glossy magazine with a distinctly Hearst character. The editorial voice shifted; the production values climbed.

  The name itself changed on Hearst's watch. Editor Charles Hanson Towne, who took the helm in 1926, added a second "a" to "Bazar." The magazine first appeared as Harper's Bazaar with its November 1929 issue, though the formal filing of that name change did not happen until the 30th of December 1930. The corporate offices today sit in the Hearst Tower at 300 West 57th Street in Midtown Manhattan, near Columbus Circle.

  Carmel Snow crossed into Hearst territory in 1932, arriving from the magazine's great rival, Vogue, where she had felt constrained under editor-in-chief Edna Woolman Chase. Her departure was treated by Vogue's leadership as a betrayal. Conde Nast, publisher of Vogue, never spoke to Snow again.

• 4. Brodovitch and the Art of the Page

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  Alexey Brodovitch was introduced to Carmel Snow following a design exhibition at the Art Directors Club. She offered him the art director position that same evening. He accepted, and from 1934 to 1958 he overhauled what a magazine page could look like.

  Brodovitch introduced the Didot typeface to Harper's Bazaar, and it became the magazine's logo font. Publications including Vogue, L'Officiel, and Elle later adopted Didot for their own logos. His signature techniques, white space and cropped layouts, became reference points for the industry. Truman Capote described him this way: "What Dom Pérignon was to champagne... so Brodovitch has been to... photographic design and editorial layout."

  One of Brodovitch's assistants at the magazine was Tony Lane, who later became the art director of Rolling Stone. Brodovitch also brought in photographers and artists whose names would define twentieth-century visual culture: Richard Avedon, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Irving Penn, Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, and Andy Warhol. Avedon himself went through fourteen interviews before he was hired. The photographer Norman Norell once called Harper's Bazaar "a photographer's magazine," a phrase that pointed directly to the Brodovitch era. Brodovitch struggled with alcoholism in his later years, was fired in 1958, and his wife died the following year. He moved to the south of France after a hip injury in 1967 and died there in 1971.

• 5. Photographs That Changed Fashion

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  In 1933, Carmel Snow and the Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkácsi went to a windswept winter beach on Long Island to shoot swimwear. It was Munkácsi's first fashion assignment. A photograph from that day showed model Lucile Brokaw running toward the camera at full stride. Before that image, fashion photography had almost universally positioned models as mannequins, still and studio-lit. That single photo is remembered as a turning point for the entire field.

  Late in 1935, Snow spotted a young Diana Vreeland dancing at the St. Regis Hotel bar wearing a lace dress by Chanel. The following day she commissioned Vreeland to write a column for the magazine called "Why Don't You... ?" A typical installment asked readers things like: "Why don't you... wear, like the Duchess of Kent, three enormous diamond stars arranged in your hair in front?" Vreeland later inspired the character Maggie Prescott in Funny Face, played by Kay Thompson. Richard Avedon inspired the character Dick Avery in the same film, played by Fred Astaire.

  Guadeloupean model and dancer Ady Fidelin was featured in September 1937, becoming the first Black model in a major American fashion magazine. Chinese-American model China Machado appeared in the February 1959 issue, making her one of the first people of color featured prominently in the American fashion press. Hearst had opposed her inclusion, fearing Southern subscribers would cancel. She eventually became the magazine's fashion director.

  Photographer Gleb Derujinsky, who worked with the magazine from 1950 to 1968, pioneered a different approach: shooting haute couture dresses against deserts, junkyards, fairgrounds, and airports. In 1957 he traveled to eleven countries in 28 days with models Nena von Schlebrügge and Ruth Neumann, in cooperation with Pan Am, for the inauguration of the Boeing 707.

• 6. Tilberis and the Second Reinvention

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  Liz Tilberis was appointed editor-in-chief in 1992. She had previously run British Vogue, taking over from Anna Wintour in 1987. Her ambition at Harper's Bazaar, shared with art director Fabien Baron, was explicit: they wanted to make it "the most beautiful fashion magazine in the world."

  The Tilberis-Baron years are credited with returning the magazine to what observers described as a fashion publishing industry powerhouse, reversing a period when the magazine had been seen as losing ground to Vogue, its long-time rival. Tilberis held the editor-in-chief position until 1999. Kate Betts followed from 1999 to 2001, and then Glenda Bailey led the magazine from 2001 until 2020.

  Samira Nasr took over as editor-in-chief in 2020 and remains in that role. Her stated vision for the magazine is that Harper's Bazaar "uses fashion as a way to explore the forces shaping culture today and to tell the most urgent stories of the moment." In December 2025, Hearst Magazines announced a company-wide ban on promoting fur across all editorial content and advertising, a policy covering Harper's Bazaar and its international editions.

• 7. A Magazine Without Borders

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  Harper's Bazaar UK launched in London in 1929. In November 1970, Hearst merged it with Queen magazine, which had been published since 1862, to create Harpers & Queen. That combined title leaned into British high society and aristocratic life. In March 2006 it was renamed Harper's Bazaar, bringing it back into alignment with the global brand.

  The UK edition has maintained a distinct literary identity. Writers including Evelyn Waugh, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and Virginia Woolf contributed to it historically. More recently Ali Smith, Jeanette Winterson, and Margaret Atwood have written for it, and the magazine runs its own Literary Salon.

  As of 2026, Harper's Bazaar publishes 31 active editions around the world, in languages from Arabic and Vietnamese to Czech and Serbian. The editions span markets as different as Kazakhstan, where the magazine has published in Russian since 2004, and Ecuador, where it relaunched in 2025 after a six-year gap. Harper's Bazaar Qatar began in 2022. The Polish edition, which ran from 2013 to 2019, is scheduled to relaunch in 2026. The Russia edition, which launched in 1996, closed in 2022.