Reimaging the Brand: ‘Restyling’ Culture and Nostalgia in the Magazines of ASOS and TOPSHOP

In 2025, journalist Angelo Ruggeri wrote about the emerging trend of the fashion brand magazine, with a focus on the fashion powerhouses Chanel and Dior. Ruggeri was intent on defining print media as the ‘new frontier’ of brand storytelling, a pioneering ‘strategic shift’ in luxury marketing.1 Yet, this is no ‘new frontier’, but rather a resurgence of an infallible marketing device. A promotional tool that chronologically maps fashion’s symbiotic relationship with the ‘brand magazine’. One that is not restricted to the upper echelon of high fashion.

Mass fashion brands have always worked in tandem with the printed medium. A crucial tool for communicating’ aspirational lifestyles, aesthetic ideals and culture, navigated by a curated desirability. Early and mid-twentieth-century British fashion retailers such as Littlewoods, Marks and Spencer, Biba, and C&A each had their own ‘in-house’ magazine created for their target consumer. Fashion editorials featuring celebrities and narratives of beauty and fashion were interspersed with articles on contemporary feminist themes and seasonal inspiration. The latter half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw leading brands TOPSHOP and ASOS move between print and digital publications to encourage creative expression through fashion; however, both ceased magazine production due to a changing approach to marketing and, in the case of TOPSHOP, a pull away from the high street. Recently, however, both TOPSHOP and ASOS have returned to the magazine as they reimagine themselves as brands and within consumers’ perceptions. ASOS relaunched its in-house magazine in 2018 with its Work-in-Progress unisex issue and is currently promoting its 25th year of ‘iconic’ trading and ‘restyling culture’ by resharing the covers from its ‘magazine archive’ on the pages of its online shop; while TOPSHOP is creating a new digital and print magazine that will rely on nostalgia to revive its ‘trailblazing reputation’.

Following the Modernist Journals Project instructions on ‘how to read a magazine’ and their subgrouping of ‘something that may only be observed across multiple issues’, this case study will focus on the storytelling in the magazines of ASOS and TOPSHOP to explore brand narratives and time-specific cultural representation. Taking direction from Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the cultural intermediary, Patrick Metzger’s phenomenon of the nostalgia pendulum and Joseph Hancock’s branding identity, this case study will reflect on the proposed book’s key theme of ‘how the fashion brand magazine exists as an inherently ambivalent entity that holds cultural value while also functioning as a form of promotion’.