Prestige Print
- Ruth
- Aug 1
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 12
After years of digital dominance, legacy titles and brands are embracing print as a luxury, immersive medium to extend storytelling, elevate experiences, and forge deeper connections with their audience.
The print landscape has experienced a quiet yet powerful resurgence. Once assumed to be eclipsed by digital media, print is now being reimagined as a cultural asset, an object that offers weight, texture, and permanence in a time of transient, scrollable content. This renewed investment is not nostalgia but a recognition of print’s ability to deliver depth, distinctiveness, and sensory engagement that digital channels cannot match. For luxury brands, legacy publishers, and cultural communities, print is becoming a platform to create collectible, curated experiences that extend their brand worlds into tangible form.
In a climate where digital content is abundant and ephemeral, audiences are placing renewed value on the physical and the permanent. Print invites a different pace of engagement, its tangibility encourages focus, while its design and production values offer a sense of occasion.
Alongside this, the luxury sector’s focus on craftsmanship aligns naturally with print’s tactile qualities. Sustainability narratives also play a role, with publishers increasingly adopting responsibly sourced materials and smaller, high-quality print runs aimed at long-term value rather than mass distribution.
A 2018 study of over 10,000 academic students across 21 countries found a strong preference for print over digital formats, particularly for long-form content, citing better focus and deeper retention.
Relaunched Legacy
Magazines have increasingly been treated as cultural artefacts: objects to display, collect and return to, rather than fleeting items to skim and discard. That logic underpins the recent string of legacy relaunches, where established titles re-enter print with a focus on design, duration and scarcity.
In March 2025 i-D reappeared on UK newsstands as a biannual, collectible edition priced at £20. The relaunch favors long form profiles and artful production values over listicles and churn; its editorial tone and physical heft are designed to reward slow reading and to exist as a shelf object that signals taste.
In the US, Complex revived a flagship print issue at Art Basel Miami in December 2024. Priced at $30, the relaunch was described by its editor as "editorial merch”, a nod to how print now functions as both content and collectible brand artefact for fan communities.
Playboy also returned to print with a new annual issue timed to Super Bowl week in February 2025. Under editor Mark Healy the title has publicly emphasised inclusion, design and storytelling as core priorities for its reboot.
Across these examples the pattern is consistent: publishers are curating fewer, higher-quality touchpoints that leverage print’s sensory qualities to reassert editorial authority, create scarcity-driven desirability and convert ephemeral attention into durable cultural capital. For readers this means magazines act as signals of identity, knowledge and belonging and for publishers print becomes a way to re-anchor legacy IP in a media ecology that prizes authenticity and objects that outlast a single scroll.
Extended Luxury Portfolios
Publishing houses are widening their footprint in luxury by launching or refocusing print products that serve high-value audiences and lifestyle verticals. In October 2024 Harper’s Bazaar France introduced Intérieurs, a quarterly dedicated to luxury interior design and led by Isis-Colombe Combréas. The title aims explicitly at the design community, invoking craft, provenance and the aesthetics that matter to buyers and makers alike. That same month L’Officiel relaunched its Japanese edition and signalled plans for further regional print editions; the strategy is to adapt a global fashion brand into culturally specific, collectible print objects that resonate in local luxury markets.
These moves reflect a recognition that regional editorial curation and deep vertical focus are potent ways to translate brand prestige into physical form. In May 2025 Tablet, previously a digital platform for Jewish life and culture, produced its first print edition, visually channeling the radical, art-directed sensibility of Nova magazine. Tablet’s approach shows how legacy or niche digital brands can use print to consolidate an intellectual identity and create a tangible artefact that holds aesthetic and archival value.
Together these launches point to a refined publishing logic: brands use print to deepen the halo around their luxury offerings, to create collectible editions that can be merchandised, and to provide a slower, more considered experience that aligns with the tastes of affluent, culturally literate readers.
Communities in Print
Print is once again becoming an effective vehicle for communities and for brands to cultivate cultural credibility. Amsterdam’s queer publication BUTT has been supported by Bottega Veneta since its post-hiatus relaunch; the continued sponsorship has allowed the title to scale production while retaining editorial independence, demonstrating how fashion houses can underwrite and be associated with niche cultural voices without co-opting them.
Chanel’s Culture Fund marked the brand’s UK centenary in June 2025 with Arts & Culture Magazine, a 250-page collectible that collates essays, archival material and commissioned work; the project functions as both institutional storytelling and an act of cultural patronage distributed through select independent booksellers.
Streaming service MUBI, after running the biannual publication Notebook , announced MUBI Editions in April 2025 to publish longer form cinema books and projects, showing how platform businesses are extending into print to deepen audience engagement and cultural authority.
Metrograph, the New York cinema, launched The Metrograph as a biannual in late 2024, translating its programme curation into a tangible publication for cinephile communities. Finally, the dating app Feeld introduced AMF (A F*cking/Feeld Magazine) in October 2024; the biannual zine explores intimacy and identity and signals how even dating platforms use printed matter to cultivate stronger subcultural ties.
These examples reveal a pattern: when brands or platforms invest in printed editions, they aren’t merely creating another marketing channel. They are subsidising slow culture, commissioning longform work, supporting creative networks, and producing objects that sustain and codify the communities they serve.
The global print market was estimated to be worth $348.31 billion in 2024 (source). However, this current wave of print innovation is powered by a very different economic model than the one that sustained magazines in the past. Direct-to-consumer sales, independent funding, and brand partnerships are replacing traditional reliance on broad advertising, giving publishers and creators more control over editorial direction and production quality.
The printed format embodies slowness, curation, and depth, qualities that stand in sharp contrast to the speed and disposability of digital feeds. For Gen Z in particular, this aligns with a growing appetite for meaningful, aesthetically distinctive storytelling that can be kept, displayed, and revisited. Furthermore, it offers a sensory, immersive experience rather than just another piece of content to swipe past, while also freeing creators from the constraints of algorithms that flatten digital media into sameness.
In this space, taste becomes a form of currency, with certain magazines functioning as subtle markers of identity and belonging, objects that carry an “if you know, you know” value within cultural circles. The high prices charged for biannual or annual editions are only adding to their allure as collectible, luxury items.
The renewed presence of print is not a nostalgic step back but a pivot toward a more intentional, high-value form of publishing proving that, reimagined for a new generation, the printed page still has the power to lead cultural conversation.
