In early June of this yr, one in all Germany’s longest-running indie fashion magazines will collaborate with one in all the country’s best-known and most generally read newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, often colloquially known as the FAZ.

Celebrating Achtung magazine’s twentieth birthday and the tenth birthday of the Frankfurter Allgemeine’s monthly lifestyle complement, the collaboration involves an insert with a double cover. One cover will probably be typical of the more conservative newspaper’s regular lifestyle complement, launched in 2013, and the opposite, a bolder, more creative look from Achtung’s editors. 

It could sound like an odd pairing but Achtung founder Markus Ebner said the 2 have more in common than one might expect. 

“I’ve been working for FAZ as their chief stylist for about 10 years and as a fashion critic for the newspaper,” Ebner told WWD. While talking to the magazine’s editor, Alfons Kaiser, in regards to the two anniversaries and considering the annual promoting drought throughout the European summer, “the thought of a collaboration was launched,” Ebner said. The split issue will come out on June 10.

For Achtung magazine and Ebner, that is, he said, “a dream come true. It gives us a possibility to bring our content to a much wider audience. We’re going from 20,000 to as much as 250,000,” he said.

In 2021 audits, the FAZ newspaper had a paid circulation of around 201,000 and readership estimated at over 880,000 in 2021. 

And after all, Ebner conceded, FAZ’s own magazine could be hoping to expand their reach, too, especially with potential high-end advertisers who might often prefer to pay for pages in additional area of interest publications.

It’s true that the readers who favor the various media are more likely to be quite different from each other. But as Ebner explained, Achtung is developing content especially for this issue, without sacrificing their very own handwriting.

Achtung’s first cover in 2003 featured model Karolína Kurkova and her grandmother and the twentieth anniversary edition will feature similar cross-generational portraits and interviews, including of the previous editor of Vogue Germany, Christiane Arp, and well-known German art collector, Karen Boros, who, in her 60s, modeled for Balenciaga. These local icons will probably be juxtaposed with the likes of an up-and-coming Turkish rapper, aged 19, and Ebner believes the combination of subject material should appeal to everyone. 

Ebner hopes it might be even greater than that, though. He sees the collaboration as being much like the way in which by which Gucci and Prada collaborated with Adidas. Once they began, collaborations like that brought “some fresh air to the style industry,” he said. “In an age of shrinking circulation and smaller budgets, this might offer a latest way forward, in publishing, too.”