Was the joke that the Opening Ceremony imprimatur and Glamour’s platform could convince fashion lemmings like us that cat sweaters are cool? Come next Fashion Week, would we be reading a Glamour tell-all about how it gamed the fashion marketing machine to trick us into spending $99 on a garment most often found in a Midwestern Salvation Army?

Not likely.

It turns out the cat sweater was just one of a slew of unconventional but earnest marketing experiments Condé Nast’s stumbling cash cow debuted at Fashion Week—foremost its redesign.

The eye-catching new cover featured Amanda Seyfried, looking like a deer in Terry Richardson’s flash (though Ellen von Unwerth actually took the picture), posed on a bathroom sink and aiming a cartoonish yellow hair dryer at her pretty head. The magazine swapped its hot-pink type face for the same bright yellow (the color suggests breaking news, editor in chief Cindi Leive told The New York Times) and traded traditional cover lines for the one-word headers typically found across a blog navigation bar (Sex! Shopping! Beauty! Guys! Gossip!).

The Ting Tings played the redesign party, held at the Box last Friday, Fashion Week’s halfway point. The cover girl couldn’t make it, but Krysten Ritter, the Breaking Bad star featured in the magazine’s new entertainment news section, “Obsessed,” looked swanlike in white as she danced in a booth by the stage. Coco Rocha made an appearance, but it was male models who were stationed along the walkway with trays of Champagne.

Upstairs, a topless variant stood beside a stripper pole, sipping water.

“Do you dance here often?” Off the Record asked.

He looked a little insulted.

“I’m just here to supervise, in case any of the ladies want to try out the pole,” he said. “Do you want to give it a go?”

This exchange, combined with the sighting of a particularly striving quartet of socialites, hinted that the party was a destination for those not on the lists that night at Le Baron or the Boom Boom Room. But the all-you-can-eat Glamour burger truck stationed nearby reminded us of the upshot of being unpretentious.

Indeed, two initiatives launched by the magazine’s business side during Fashion Week suggested a similar and refreshing honesty about its relationship to commerce.

“Magazines used to be just about raising awareness for brands,” Glamour executive vice president and publishing director Bill Wackermann told Off the Record. “Today brands like Glamour are going well beyond that. We are bringing readers closer to purchase consideration and sale.”

In its September issue, Glamour experimented with embedding SpyderLynk brand SnapTags on its pages. By downloading the Glamour Friends & Fans app to their smart phones and aiming its camera at the pages, readers could unlock original content or special promotions.

“September’s SnapTag-enabled issue gave us a powerful story of consumer interaction and engagement,” Mr. Wackermann said. “With the March issue, we took it to the next level by incorporating m-commerce.”

Now readers can buy products right off Glamour’s pages—advertisements and editorial.

To promote the app, the magazine set up taxi stands at the corners of Fashion Week’s Bermuda Triangle (Lincoln Center, the Standard Hotel and the Condé Nast Building) and ferried influencers around town in their Lancôme Mobile Taxis. The rides were free, but the passengers were a captive audience for a two-minute video about the latest Lancôme and Yves St. Laurent beauty trends, which riders could shop by aiming their phones at the screen.

After the taxi promotion ended, Mr. Wackermann cut the ribbon on another m-commerce gimmick, this one for pedestrians. The Glamour Apothecary Wall, the 10-foot-tall, two-dimensional likeness of drug store shelves, now illuminates the sidewalk a few cobblestones away from the Standard Grill. Modeled on the virtual Tesco convenience store built in a Korean subway station last year, passersby can use the same technology to buy a John Frieda shampoo or Dove lotion, which might seem like necessities when one is stumbling out of the Standard.

“It’s all about bringing shopping to her, whether that is in the magazine, or while she’s out on the town ... or even in the back of a taxi,” Mr. Wackermann said.

The cat sweater, however, is strictly editorial, part of the “Glamour for All” campaign launched in conjunction with the redesign.

“Each month we’ll partner with one of our favorite brands or designers to create an exclusive item at an accessible price,” fashion development director Susan Cernek told Off the Record. They’re not sharing on the literal profits, but the collaborations may pay off in brand visibility among the fashion-conscious set, a group that typically ignores Glamour.

And what better time to drum up awareness than Fashion Week, when the world’s best-dressed and genetically blessed descend upon New York to blog and be blogged? Opening Ceremony art director Su Barber’s cat, Basil, served as the model for the first installment, which applied the laws of YouTube virality to fashion design with improbable success.

The cat sweater was photographed on Susie Bubble, a blogger with 150,000 Twitter followers, Hanneli Mustaparta, a Vogue.com contributor and former model, and Kelly Framel, a.k.a the Glamourai, among others.

Call us a lemming, they made it look cool.

Ms. Leive and some impressive co-eds.

Each year, Glamour magazine highlights the accomplishments of ten college women, as a reminder to readers that women’s magazines have not yet managed to irrevocably damage all young women.

Last week, the chosen ones were flown to New York, where they toured Glamour’s offices and the U.N., took in a Broadway show and got L’Oreal makeovers.

Their arrival was like a force of nature more powerful than the tremblor, Hurricane Irene, and Fashion Week, said Bill Wackermann, Condé Nast executive vice president and publishing director of Glamour, Details, W and Bon Appetit, as he toasted the young women over breakfast at The Modern on Thursday.

“But Cindi Leive looks ready for Fashion Week,” Mr. Wackermann noted. “What are those shoes?”

Ms. Leive, Glamour’s editor-in-chief, stuck a slender leg out from under her table to reveal a metallic platform pump.

“Copper,” she said. “Killer.”

“Bitchin’!” Mr. Wackermann said. “Speaking of someone who’s not a bitch, but bitching …”

“The 10 of you are a great hope for this country,” Ms. Leive said.

The Glamour Top 10 College Women award, now in its 54th year, was once the Top 10 Best Dressed College Women (Martha Stewart was a winner), but was later changed to recognize more serious achievement.

This year’s class included Allison Schmitt, an Olympic bronze medalist; Isha Jain, a 20-year-old Harvard senior who has co-authored six scientific papers; and Katie Miller, the West Point cadet who dropped out in protest of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and escorted gay rights activist Lady Gaga to the V.M.A.’s.

Of course, college is not the only route to success for women—at least according to auto racer Danica Patrick, who spoke at a Glamour panel on the secrets of success for 20-something women the night before. “I’m probably not the smartest person in the world, but the older I get the more I want to learn, the more I ask questions,” she told the group. “And I’m really lucky, I have a super smart husband.”

Conde Nast hung out the help wanted sign in May, according to AdWeek, as Mr. Wackermann, who has overseen Glamour since 2004, took on additional duties at W, Bon Appetit and Details.

2011 has been rocky for Glamour so far. Newsstand sales dropped 17 percent in the first four months, according to WWD, but a thick September issue brought in the magazine's all-time highest revenue. The brand has implemented alternative marketing strategies like snap tags (print advertisements which readers can hover their smart phones over to be taken to Glamour's Facebook page and special deals from advertisers) and the Glamour-flavored donut. 

Prior to working at EW, Mr. Wagenheim worked the management ladder at Conde Nast, as associate publisher of Vanity Fair, executive director of Conde Nast Media Group, an associate publisher of Conde Nast Traveler.

If the first September 2010 numbers to trickle out are any indication, the fashion magazines seem to be getting off their diets. Glamour, one of the most reliable cash cows at Condé Nast, is reporting that its ad pages are up 57 percent for the month: 241 ad pages for September 2010 compared with 153 for a year earlier ...

“People that had taken a break last year are coming back,” said William J. Wackermann, a Condé Nast senior vice president and the publishing director of Glamour, Brides, Details and W.

Mr. Wackermann said he had seen more interest from a broad array of advertisers, whether beauty companies like L’Oréal or financial companies like Chase and American Express.

Next month, Mr. Wackermann will ship the biggest Glamour in 20 years, his 400-page September issue. He attributed the success to a cross-platform sales effort — iPad-print synergy!

Vogue's September numbers are coming out later today. We're going to guess: more good news.

"[The Bulgari garden party] just didn't feel right for the brand," publisher Bill Wackermann told WWD.

"Details isn't prime time ... we're late night," he said.

The events will be “more on the DL and not as over-the-top,” one spokesman told WWD.

Mr. Wackermann  took over the magazine's business side in October of last year to reorient Details.

It looks like the book still has some explaining to do to advertisers. Details ad sales are down 24.5 percent so far this year, while GQ and Esquire are up 10.6 and 15.5 percent, respectively.

Details editor Dan Peres answered some existential questions about his magazine at its faux 10th anniversary party at the Boom Boom Room back in March.

"The reality is, we're most certainly one of the smallest magazines in the company in terms of circulation, budget, resources, head count and, to some degree, what our contribution can be and has been to the bottom line of this company," Mr. Peres told The Observer.

Mr. Wackermann will work alongside new W editor Stefano Tonchi and his team of T Magazine expats. W joins Glamour, Details and Brides in Mr. Wackermann's stable of titles.

Mr. Wackermann certainly has his work cut out for him at W, where single-copy sales and ad pages were down 42% and 16% respectively in the second half of 2009. Recent comebacks in the luxury goods market should spark a revival, at least in ad sales.

There was the faux anniversary, yes, but there was another reason to celebrate: In 2009, a year of reckoning for Condé Nast, when six magazines were shuttered and hundreds were laid off and millions of dollars were shed off the budget, Details survived.

And yet the question persists in almost every corner of the magazine world: How, and why, does Details still exist?

When popular Condé Nast titles Gourmet and Domino folded last year, vigils popped up everywhere: on the Internet, on television, in the papers. But you get the feeling that if Details died, its wake wouldn’t be very well attended. “Why are we still here and Gourmet is not? Why are we here and Cookie is not?” said Dan Peres, the 10-year editor of Details. “I may have opinions to those things, but it’s simply: We’re still here. As I said to my team, after those decisions were made, we deserve to still be here, and now we have to earn it.”

>>READ KOBLIN'S BACKSTORY: THE GILDED AGE OF CONDE NAST IS OVER

Condé Nast sources explained it this way: Details is around because it doesn’t hurt the company. “It’s not such a glaring thing on the bottom line,” said one Condé Nast source. “It doesn’t make any money, but it doesn’t lose a lot of money, either. Why close it and cause the drama?”

“It may not be a cash cow, but if it’s a rounding error, who cares?” said a Condé publisher.

“The reality is, we’re most certainly one of the smallest magazines in the company in terms of circulation, budget, resources, head count and, to some degree, what our contribution can be and has been to the bottom line of this company,” said Mr. Peres.

Last year, Condé Nast’s decisions, inspired by a review from the consulting firm McKinsey, were ruthlessly practical: The magazines that made the money stayed, and the ones that didn’t folded. This is why a magazine like Bon Appetit, which may lack all the emotional capital that Gourmet had stockpiled, survived, and Ruth Reichl’s title did not.

Moreover, sources explained, executives at the company felt that it was critical to have two men’s magazines in the same house. Peter Hunsinger, the publisher of GQ, lobbied for Details’ continued existence last year, sources said. The logic went like this: Most of the advertisers in Details are ones that GQ has already. GQ doesn’t view Details as a rival, and, at least within the corridors of 4 Times Square, it doesn’t see Esquire as real competition right now, either. But if Details suddenly disappeared, where would those advertisers go? Well, they’d have plenty of reasons to take a hard look at Esquire. At the least, there would be extra money for advertisers to spread around in an increasingly smaller market. And then suddenly GQ could have an Elle vs. Vogue situation on its hands with Esquire—something it most certainly does not want, and Condé Nast doesn’t need.

“We are stronger together; we run the town,” said Mr. Hunsinger.

The other person responsible for Details’ continued life is Bill Wackermann, the influential publisher of Glamour, who convinced Si Newhouse and Chuck Townsend that he should have a chance to get his hands on the magazine. Details, he argued, isn’t a legacy title. GQ and Vanity Fair are magazines whose strength lies in their history. Details can be experimented with; it can feel fresh.

They listened and fired Details publisher Steven DeLuca and replaced him with Mr. Wackermann as publishing director.

“I haven’t been shy about my enthusiasm for this magazine,” said Mr. Wackermann.

Certainly, the magazine needed to get off to a quick start. Late last year, shortly after he got the job, Mr. Wackermann took Mr. Peres and some editorial and business staffers to the Greenwich Hotel and argued why there needed to be a 10th anniversary issue. It was a curious thing to some: Details is in its 28th year of publication, and even if you count its birth date after it was relaunched by Fairchild in 2000, then its anniversary is in the fall, not March.

“Bill wanted it and I understand why,” said Mr. Peres. “He wanted to pack a punch in the first half of that year.”

(The 10th anniversary issue ultimately had seven fewer ad pages than last year’s March issue; March issues are seen almost as important as September issues for fashion magazines.)

So where does Details turn next now that it has its lifeline? Mr. Wackermann has been trying to be bold on the business side, and Mr. Peres said the magazine would be slightly less gloomy—fewer stories on Should You have Children? or Why You Should Retire—but added, “Is the core DNA of this magazine changing? No.”

So for those in media circles who scratch their head trying to understand Details—Is it gay, or not? Why is there so much bathroom humor? What’s the point?—they’ll probably have more to say.

(In fact, here’s one of them! The magazine’s former fashion director, Michael Macko, who was laid off in October, said in an interview, “The Details reader loves fashion, but Details doesn’t love fashion. If Dan Peres is Details, Details resents fashion. It’s biting the hand that feeds it.” Mr. Peres responded by saying, “There’s a difference between respecting and appreciating fashion and being a fashion victim, clearly a distinction lost on some.”)

One thing is evident: Mr. Peres has no apologies.

“I’m not making a magazine for everyone,” said Mr. Peres. “We have a loyal readership, and they happen to be a desirable group and appealing to marketers. And not everyone is apart of that group. Why is this magazine here? Why is this magazine reporting on someone with Down syndrome who is trying to lose his virginity? It’s not for everyone.”

More: Sexton, Times Metro Editor, Stays Put >

jkoblin@observer.com

Bill Wackermann, the publisher of Glamour, will now be responsible for Details, while Lucy Kriz will retain her title as associate publisher.  Mr. Wackermann was formerly the publisher of Details.

This is only the latest change. Yesterday, Conde Nast replaced Brides publisher Alison Adler-Matz with Carolyn Kremins, most recently the publisher of Cookie.

Details has long been on a short-list of magazines that could potentially be eliminated, but was thrown a life line this year. It'll be up to Mr. Wackermann--who was named the publishing director of Domino only weeks before it was eliminated--to try to make it a viable business.

This was keenly observed by many Condé Nast publishers and business people in the room at the company's annual January retreat (this time on Lexington Avenue instead of at a sunny resort in Flordia). Two weeks earlier, Mr. Wackermann was named the "publishing director" of Domino, a move that gave him full control of the embattled magazine, but allowed Ms. Brenner to retain her title.

So as Mr. Wackermann and Ms. Brenner chatted away a few nights ago, several in the room started to think that Domino's new team was starting to gel, and maybe there was hope for the magazine, after all.

Ms. Brenner told us as much when the announcement was made.

"I know you wanted to talk about today's events, which I see only as a great show of support by Condé Nast for Domino and our future," she wrote in an email the day Mr. Wackermann got his new job. "Bill is a super smart and a great businessman and I am thrilled to have him as my partner on Domino."

But all wasn't well. In the previous weeks, according to sources, Condé Nast execs were quietly looking around in-house to replace Ms. Brenner as publisher. No one wanted the job.

The shelter category has been the magazine world's biggest victim thanks to the recession, and Domino's dim prospects have been widely speculated about at 4 Times Square.

Yesterday, Si Newhouse folded Domino, and Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend said in a statement that it was because "this economic market will not support our business expectations."

It seemed to catch everyone by surprise.

Editorial staffers who remained optimistic were said to be caught entirely off guard. On Tuesday night, when Condé Nast was handing out its awards to publishers of the year over plates of creamy polenta and duck at the West Side Italian restaurant, Scarpetta, it was mentioned by no one.

The Wackermann resurrection project, for whatever reason, was abruptly abandoned.

A spokeswoman told The Observer that the economy forced an immediate decision. But it appeared to have all the signs of that old tale told throughout the ages at Condé Nast: Si Newhouse woke up and made a decision.

Ms. Brenner and editor in chief Deborah Needleman were both leaving the company, a spokeswoman said, and some editorial and business staffers would be retained, but she couldn't say how many.

In media circles, Domino was a popular magazine. It launched with great buzz in 2005, and the magazine was nominated for two National Magazine Awards in 2008.

And from a business standpoint, Domino isn't DNR, nor is it Men's Vogue, which Condé Nast recently folded and downsized, respectively. Domino, with a circulation of 800,000, is the biggest magazine the company has shut down since House & Garden in the fall of 2007.

The shuttering of Domino, with ad pages down only 5 percent in 2008 against double-digit losses on average industry-wide, has led sources in the building at 4 Times Square to wonder whether respectable numbers alone are enough to ensure a magazine's continued support by the company.

What if the standards for revenue are higher for what are called "B titles," the second-ranking title in a particular category? Looked at one way, Domino, though very different from Architectural Digest, is not the premier title in its category.

Take, for example, Details. The title won a publishing award on Tuesday night, capping off a year in which ad pages were down just 6 percent. But is that good enough when the company has to spend money and effort finding advertisers to support the A-title in the men's category, GQ?

Bon Appetit was, inside the building, considered a likelier target of cuts than Domino had been. Its ad pages are suffering much more acutely than Domino's were, and the title is the little sister of industry leader Gourmet.

The news that jobs would be found inside the company for many of Domino's employees seem to suggest that the move is a consolidation in the category. If that's true, B titles, regardless of how well or poorly they are doing, may be the next targets.