This year, Vogue’s September issue is landing with a different kind of thud.
Anna Wintour named her successor as editor for Vogue’s prestigious US edition on Tuesday, but media and fashion insiders shrugged as the glossy faces declining readership — and relevance.
The feared editrix, the icy inspiration for Meryl Streep’s cold and calculating fashion editor in “The Devil Wears Prada,” handpicked longtime social media editor Chloe Malle — the 39-year-old daughter of actress Candice Bergen and the late film director Louis Malle — as the new head of editorial content at Vogue US.
Industry insiders noted that while Malle brings stability and some famous contacts, she doesn’t necesarily have the chops to grow the fashion bible’s business to counterbalance systemic readership losses in the magazine industry.
“Let’s be honest, it doesn’t matter who they hire at Vogue, it’s over,” one source told The Post.
“They could have hired Carrie Bradshaw from ‘Sex and the City’ and it would still be over.”
The glossy’s decline can literally be weighed by the slimmed-down size of its famed September issue, which in its heyday ballooned to nearly 1,000 pages. This year’s version, featuring Emma Stone on the cover, came in at 365 pages.
A Vogue spokesperson told The Post that revenue from digital and events make up 70% of Vogue’s business. They include major events like Vogue World, The Met Ball and Forces of Fashion.
The shift in strategy by the Conde Nast-owned company was linked to the decline in print and the magazine’s need to focus on new avenues to drum up business, the rep added.
In her pitch to Condé Nast, which also owns The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ and Wired, Malle said Vogue should print just a handful of issues each year instead of a monthly magazine, according to The New York Times.
Printed on thick, high-quality paper and tied to specific themes or cultural moments, these magazines could serve as collectibles, said Malle, who is expected to publish her first print issue next year.
“Placing my own stamp on this is going to be the most important part of this being a success. There has to be a noticeable shift that makes this mine,” Malle told the Times, adding that a new Vogue editor can’t just churn out “Anna lite.”
But the idea isn’t novel — magazines have been doing it for decades amid falling print readership — and won’t likely be enough to pull Vogue back to its glory days when it boasted hundreds of advertising pages in its September issue.
“The model of monthly issues doesn’t seem to work anymore,” another source told The Post. “Nobody is buying magazines. I do think that each magazine needs to feel very special. Why else would you read the magazine? Themed-issues can seem very special to the reader.”
While Malle is reimagining Vogue’s print, Wintour, who has held the title for 37 years, plans to stay in her same office just down the hall, and work on expanding the brand’s global reach.
Wintour, 75, will remain Malle’s direct supervisor as chief content officer at Condé Nast and Vogue’s global editorial director.
“The truth is that no one’s going to replace Anna,” Malle told the New York Times.
Malle said she’s “very happy” that Wintour will remain within earshot – but she admitted that “some people who were interested in this job were sort of daunted by the idea of Anna being down the hall.”
In remarks to staff members on Tuesday, Wintour acknowledged the strange set-up, referring to herself as Malle’s “mentor but also…her student.”
The new US editor is viewed as a more relaxed and outgoing personality than Wintour. Malle is known to decorate her office with Lego models of Disney villains built by her 5-year-old son and has danced with musician Jon Batiste at a Tommy Hilfiger runway show.
“People in the fashion industry and at Vogue respect Chloe,” the fashion insider who knows Malle told The Post, adding that she is a “firm” but “very personable” leader.
The source added that Condé Nast, which is in perpetual cost-cutting mode, was likely able to avoid shelling out the big bucks that come with landing a bigger name.
The Vogue rep wouldn’t comment on Malle’s salary.
Vogue’s website could also use an overhaul, Malle admitted, focusing less on trending news stories and more on witty, in-depth features that appeal to “a more direct, smaller, healthier audience.”
The digital site rushed out a pre-written story about Taylor Swift’s engagement to Travis Kelce – but it was the magazine’s analysis of her diamond ring that actually performed better, Malle said.
Identifying more as a journalist than as a fashionista, Malle has written major profiles for Vogue – recently receiving death threats for her digital cover story on Lauren Sánchez Bezos, who married Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in an extravagant Venice ceremony in June.
“I do think there is an element of endorsement with a Vogue cover, and I do think that it is worth taking a calculated risk,” Malle told the New York Times.
“You want something to be a moment, and that was a huge moment for us,” she said. “That was what everyone was talking about. And we had that, and we owned it.”
She declined to comment on whether she would ever put Melania Trump on the cover of Vogue.
As the website’s editor, Malle helped the site break WNBA news and hired Kennedy heir Jack Schlossberg, known for his wild social media rants, as a political correspondent during last year’s presidential election.
Malle calls herself a “proud ‘nepo baby’” – saying it would be “delusional to say otherwise.”
“I will say, though, that it has always made me work much harder. It has been a goal for a lot of my life to prove that I’m more than Candice Bergen’s daughter, or someone who grew up in Beverly Hills,” she told the Times.
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