On Everything #112: DMR: Meet the System That Is Killing Fashion Magazines

On Everything is a weekly newsletter from Eugene Rabkin, our founder and editor.

It’s no longer a secret that as the fashion brands became more powerful while fashion magazines have diminished in stature, they have ceded editorial authority, kowtowing to the demands of advertisers. By and large the days when magazines did their primary job, which is to offer a point of view, to choose what they deem interesting, to put it most plainly, to edit, are over. What is less known is how insidious the control by brands over what shows up in the pages of many magazines has gotten through a little-known system called DMR.

DMR is a grading software system that was created in Italy and is now owned by a company called Launchmetrics, which, as the name implies, provides data to the fashion industry. It works by scanning editorial images of magazines and grading them based on a granular point system. It looks at which brands each image credits, whether it’s a full look, how many garments per brand are featured in each image, how much of a garment is shown, which brands the garment sits next to, how far back in the magazine the image is, and so on. It then grades all of these factors and submits reports to brands. If a magazine does not score enough points with a major advertiser, it risks incurring its wrath: unpleasant phone calls, beratings, vague threats, and sometimes outright pulling of advertising. To add insult to injury the magazines themselves, if they want to be part of the advertising system, are responsible for uploading their issues into DMR for grading.

Since we don’t take advertising and rarely shoot editorials, I was completely unaware of this until a London stylist casually mentioned it at a press dinner last year. In my naivete, I was flabbergasted. At another press dinner I asked a prominent fashion director of an Italian publication about DMR and they confirmed it.