Once upon a time 10 people worked through the night, fuelled by a diet of takeaway pizzas, frosted cupcakes and a determined motivation to give women a brand new type of magazine they didn’t yet know they wanted.
Fast forward nearly two years and that team has now doubled in size, we’ve moved into shiny new offices and we’ve won more awards than our cabinet can hold. We’ve worked with fashion legends (Karl Lagerfeld, Vivienne Westwood, Manolo Blahnik, Rankin); beauty pioneers (Alex Box, Frederic Letailleur, Duffy); art icons (Quentin Blake, Rob Ryan); interviewed Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sienna Miller and SJP and decamped to Paris to make an issue.
We’ve also inspired 1,217 women to start their own businesses, books and inventions after they attended our Stylist Network events and hopefully challenged the perception of what a women’s magazine should be.
From day one we knew we wanted to be different. We didn’t want to give you mindless celebrity gossip, diets or female misogyny – we wanted to give our readers a little more credit and flatter their intelligence instead.
And we’ve heard repeatedly from you that our plan worked. One reader Claire Powell told us, “I just wanted to congratulate you on such a thoughtful, refreshing and good-looking magazine. Where so many women’s magazines are shallow, Stylist really is a breath of fresh air (pardon the cliche).”
So, to celebrate our 100th issue (published on Wednesday, 2 November) of Stylist, we’re giving something back to you. In fact we’re giving you the whole magazine. We want you, our readers, to write, design, style and illustrate every single one of our pages for our Made By You 100th issue.
Over the next eight weeks we’ll be launching a series of competitions to find new ‘staff’ for one issue only. We’ll be searching for budding writers to pen a feature which will be published in issue 100 (you’ll be in good company, Tanya Gold, Lucy Mangan, India Knight, Zoe Williams, Caitlin Moran, Toby Young and Danny Wallace already have); we’ll be looking for keen fashion stylists, bloggers and enthusiasts to come into the Stylist office and style a fashion feature; we’ll be asking for you to send in your original recipes which we’ll print in the magazine; we’ll be looking for those with a real passion for beauty to take part in a very exciting beauty experiment and we’ll also be searching for brilliant amateur photographers and illustrators to design the pages of the magazine.
To launch the countdown to our 'Made By You' issue, we’ve decided to start with the most prestigious and important part of any magazine – the cover. Click here to discover how you could be the brains behind Stylist’s 100th cover.
