Arriving at the Grazia offices, I meet Jane Bruton twice. There is a BBC documentary crew following the magazine for six months and my first arrival is not quite right so we have to do it again for the camera. They hover around the interview for the first 20 minutes, which makes for a curiously stilted set of questions. Bruton answers quietly and professionally, but as soon as the team leave she visibly relaxes."It's a bit of a nightmare," she confides. "Since they've been following us, everyone's come into work with full make-up just in case. The day you come in with a hangover - that's the day you'll be filmed all day."Initially Bruton was reluctant to accept the request from the One Life series, but she ultimately decided it was better than having a competitor on the screen.
"At the beginning it meant our meetings were suddenly very formal and stilted," she smiles. "But we're a weekly. We don't have time to pretend. That Marie Claire documentary 10 years ago was so staged. We are what we are. Certainly it'll disabuse any work experience girls who think we're like the Devil Wears Prada - sipping champagne, trying on dresses and going to parties. And if we're going to do a documentary, then now is the right time."
Now is certainly the right time in terms of Grazia's success. Last week's ABCs had the title up 23% year-on-year to 210,200, just shy of Vogue's 219,026. In a troubled women's market, this performance was even more remarkable. Marie Claire was down almost 10%, Cosmo down 1%, New Woman down 4% and InStyle down 8%, with Red and Elle holding steady.
"Grazia's advantage is that it was a completely new launch and it made its own market," says Natalie Rutherford, associate director at Vizeum, Coca Cola and River Island's media-buying agency.
"They have their own angle on celebrity stories which keeps readers coming back, and they offer buyers a good, valuable demographic. In a way, they might be at risk of becoming a victim of their own success. They don't want to expand too much beyond their demographic as it would water down their proposition."
Bruton acknowledges adland's accolade with a wry grin. "When we launched in February 2005, everyone kept saying 'you're very brave,'" she remembers. "They didn't know what to make of a weekly glossy. I was flat-planning an issue in May with five ads. But we stuck to our guns and didn't lower our yield. Then this time last year I was out in Milan, meeting Prada and Versace, and they were finally getting it - they'd been worried about mixing celebrity paparazzi shots with fashion, but finally they liked it. Now the Italian parent has changed to copy us and we've got all those labels advertising. I regularly flat-plan with 60 ads and we can't fit any more in."
Bruton maintains that fashion is readers' primary reason for purchase, and cites a recent story on a Marc Jacobs print Louis Vuitton bag that sold out almost immediately in London and prompted seven Grazia readers to take the Eurostar to Paris to buy one. But the magazine's engagement with celebrity culture has placed it under certain harsh spotlights.
Kate Winslet is currently suing the magazine - "I can't talk about that," she shakes her head, "I'm sorry." And Kelvin MacKenzie recently cited Grazia on Question Time when discussing the tabloid scrum surrounding Kate Middleton. Bruton sighs. "We have never put Kate Middleton in the magazine," she says, emphatically.
"We don't need to do it. I go with pictures that people know are being taken. We don't do cellulite shots. We don't poke fun. We're not in that market. Our readers want to see people looking their best."
She has taken on the size zero issue in features and news stories, covering the models who have died from anorexia, but also defends the fashion industry robustly.
"A lot of what went on in last week's Fashion Week was tantamount to bullying of models like Lily Cole," she says pugnaciously. "I've met Lily Cole, and she's not that skinny. No models are size zero. If a five foot ten girl was that thin she wouldn't be able to get out of bed, let alone walk down a catwalk.
"It [the debate] didn't even start in Paris or Milan, it started in LA with the likes of Nicole Richie. But I get called to comment on it about it five times a day. I think you have to say something, because if you don't, it seems like you're scared of it. There's a risk of being misquoted - I wanted Lily Cole to write a piece but she said anything she wrote would be taken and made into something it's not - but you have to put your view across. Personally, I think the whole cult of thin is awful and disturbing and our readers do too."
Although Bruton is confident of her magazine's attitude, it did take a while for Grazia to find its feet. A decision to put full-length pap pics on the cover and introduce a section called 10 Hot Stories, which mixes hard news with celebrity break-ups, proved the turning point.
"After that sales went up 10,000 in a month," she explains. "Some people are surprised and uncomfortable with that mix. How can you go from a really hard-hitting story about women's rights in Afghanistan to the latest on the Pete and Kate show or the return of white stilettos? I think the mix is key - it's about showing how confident women are now. We can talk about politics, social issues and shoes and that's OK. They're not mutually exclusive. A few years ago, if you wanted to work for Amnesty, you would never have admitted that you were obsessed with Manolo Blahnik."
The "news and shoes" approach is pretty much Bruton's life in a nutshell. She grew up in a working-class family in Wigan. Her paternal grandfather worked on the railways and her grandmother was a midwife. Her father was the first in the family to go to university, eventually becoming a librarian.
They were old-school, self-improving working class - her grandmother read her poetry, and had brothers and sisters who had won scholarships to Oxford but could not afford to go. At the same time, her granny was obsessed with clothing. She once spent £800 on a jacket in the 1940s, effectively £8,000 today, and had to take it back because she had spent the family's life savings.
Bruton was inspired by her father. He encouraged her to study for the love of it not to plan a career, so she took English and spent her time at Nottingham University in Doc Martens, holey tights and 50s dresses, smoking roll-ups and going on student demos.
"I never thought about being a journalist," she shrugs. "The only reason I got on to the City University post-grad course was because I didn't know what else to do. I have no idea how I got on, because everybody else had spent their college years working on student papers and I did a bit for our arts mag, but it was crap. I think I was just the lucky last one."
For all her engaging diffidence, however, her CV boasts circulation rises at every mag she has edited, as well as two British Society of Magazine Editor awards.
Sue Matthias, deputy editor of the New Statesman, worked with Bruton at Eve when she relaunched the mag and believes her success is due to her approach - a blend of the serious and the frivolous that few glossies have.
"I came to Eve from a newspaper features background, and my job was to come up with the stronger stories, the kind of thing many glossy magazine editors wouldn't really get," she explains.
"We'd come up with a story on how women in Sarajevo had become infertile through the stress of the civil war, Jane got it immediately and was right behind it for the relaunch issue. I think she's got a very strong sense of what her readers want - she's got a very sharp mind and she's far too clever to flaunt it."
What does she think of that? She is momentarily nonplussed. "I think . . . I don't know . . . I've got a good team," she rustles some paper as she thinks.
"Emap says it hired me because I wanted to create a magazine for my generation. I did the same at LivingEtc." And then she pauses and laughs a wicked laugh. "Some might call it lazy because I only ever work on magazines that are aimed at me, but it does mean I can dig inside myself to work out what readers want."
Curriculum Vitae
Age 38
Education Byrchall High School, Wigan, Nottingham University and City University.
Career
1990-91 Nicholson Travel Guides, editor
1991-94 Chat, subeditor
1994-95 Wedding and Home, features editor
1995-96 Wedding and Home, deputy editor
1996-98 Prima, associate editor
1998-2002 LivingEtc, editor, awarded BSME Editor's Editor
2002-2005 Eve, editor, won BSME Editor of the Year 2004
2005-present Grazia, editor, won BSME Editor of the Year 2006
