About Brigitte

Brigitte

Brigitte is Germany's best-known classic women's magazine, published fortnightly from Hamburg. Its basic concept — a mix of fashion, beauty, culture, travel, cooking, health and home, combined with reportage, portraits and dossiers on current socially relevant topics — has remained almost unchanged since the magazine's founding in 1954, though its roots reach back to 1886. Per IVW figures for the second quarter of 2026, Brigitte sold 219,968 copies per issue with a spread circulation of 221,200, reaching around 2.0 million readers (2020). Since March 2025 it has been published by the Funke Mediengruppe, after seven decades with Gruner + Jahr.

Overview

Brigitte is the Leitmedium — the defining publication — for generations of German women: the magazine that proved a women's title could combine lifestyle with substance, covering fashion and psychology, medicine and politics, careers and the environment in a single issue. Its readership spans ages 17 to 50, partly to 60, and its 2013 editorial staff was the largest of any German women's magazine. The cover price is 4.30 euros (March 2026); editor-in-chief is Susanna Riethmüller.

History

The magazine's history begins in 1886, when it was first published as Das Blatt der Hausfrau ("The Housewife's Paper"), aimed at middle-class bourgeois housewives with articles on child-rearing and food. Publication ceased during the Second World War; the magazine was relaunched in 1949 and renamed Brigitte in 1954. In 1969 Brigitte merged with the women's magazine Constanze, consolidating its position as West Germany's leading women's fortnightly. (A predecessor title, Dies Blatt gehört der Hausfrau, had been absorbed into Brigitte between 1952 and 1954.)

Through the post-war decades Brigitte grew with its readers: the housewives of the 1950s became the working women of the 1970s and 1980s, and the magazine's mix of fashion, advice and social reportage evolved with them — never abandoning the practical service core, but steadily expanding the definition of what a women's magazine could discuss. The 1969 merger with Constanze — itself a major women's title — consolidated its market leadership at the moment West German women were entering the workforce in large numbers, and the magazine's editorial line tracked that emancipation: careers, independence, and eventually politics became as natural in its pages as recipes and fashion. By the fourth quarter of 2000 the magazine sold 958,258 copies per issue, making it one of the top 50 women's magazines worldwide; in 2010 circulation was still 693,248. The magazine launched its website in April 1997, early for the German women's press.

Brigitte repeatedly set the agenda beyond its own pages. Its 2010 "Brigitte ohne Models" (Brigitte without models) campaign — featuring real women instead of professional models — made international headlines and anticipated the body-positivity debate by several years, earning the magazine a reputation as the women's title willing to challenge its own industry's beauty standards. The magazine's engagement with social issues, from equality to the demand for the abolition of §218 (the abortion paragraph), gave it a political credibility unusual in the lifestyle segment. Brand extensions have included Brigitte Woman (for women over 40) and Brigitte Balance — launched in 2004, appearing four times a year, aimed at open-minded women aged 20 to 49 juggling career, family and self-care — each carrying the parent brand's blend of service and substance into a defined life stage.

The end of an era came in March 2025, when RTL Deutschland — which had acquired Gruner + Jahr in 2022 — sold Brigitte, together with Gala and Eltern, to the Funke Mediengruppe. Around 300 employees of the three brands moved to Funke with their existing contracts. For Brigitte, founded in the Gruner + Jahr stable and published by the Hamburg house for 70 years, the sale marked the most profound rupture in its history — and a test of whether Germany's defining women's brand can thrive outside the publishing house that created it.

Content and concept

The magazine's spectrum runs from fashion, beauty, culture, travel, cooking, health and home to psychology, partnership, medicine, environment, careers and politics. What distinguishes Brigitte from pure lifestyle titles is the weight given to current, socially relevant topics in reportage, portraits and dossiers — the magazine treats its readers as citizens, not just consumers. That dual identity, "between social relevance and classic lifestyle," has been its formula since 1954.

The readership's breadth — 17 to 60 years — is both the magazine's strength and its challenge: speaking to teenagers and grandmothers in the same issue requires an editorial range few titles attempt, from youth fashion to retirement planning, from first jobs to grandchildren. The large editorial staff (the biggest in the German women's segment as of 2013) reflects the ambition of covering so many fields with authority — and the fortnightly rhythm, more generous than the weeklies' seven-day sprint, gives reporters the time that depth requires.

Coverage and audience

Brigitte's audience is women who expect more from a magazine than diversion: the 2.0 million readers (2020) buy it for the combination of practical lifestyle content and serious journalism on the issues shaping women's lives. The fortnightly rhythm gives the editorial team room for depth — dossiers and long reportage that weeklies cannot attempt — while the fashion and beauty sections keep the title anchored in the classic women's magazine tradition.

Ownership

Since March 2025 Brigitte has been published by the Funke Mediengruppe, the Essen-based media group that acquired it with Gala and Eltern from RTL Deutschland. Funke — one of Germany's largest regional media companies, with newspapers, magazines, radio and digital across the country — framed the acquisition as an investment in journalism's future rather than a wind-down, and folded the three titles into its women's and lifestyle portfolio alongside the Axel Springer women's titles it had acquired in 2013 (Bild der Frau, Hörzu, TV Digital). The magazine's previous publisher, Gruner + Jahr — founded 1965 from the Jahr, Bucerius and Gruner companies, long Europe's largest magazine publisher — effectively ended its independent history with the sale of its last great brands. For Brigitte, the move means new ownership but an unchanged mission: the fortnightly companion for women who want both style and substance, now navigating the digital transformation under an owner betting that strong journalism brands outlast the media cycles.

Digital presence

brigitte.de, online since April 1997, is one of the longest-running women's magazine websites in Germany, extending the print brand's mix of lifestyle service and social journalism into the digital realm. The site's community features — forums, advice columns, user-generated content — and editorial coverage give the brand a daily presence between the fortnightly print issues, and its archives represent nearly three decades of German women's journalism. Under Funke's ownership, the digital brand is central to the strategy: a 70-year-old print title whose future depends on reaching the next generation of readers where they already are, without losing the authority that made Brigitte the Leitmedium in the first place.

From Das Blatt der Hausfrau (1886) to the Funke era: Brigitte has accompanied German women through 140 years of emancipation — and the magazine's own history is, in many ways, the history of its readers: their fashions, their careers, their politics, their lives, their century. No other German magazine can make that claim. The title's 140-year continuity makes it not just a magazine but a chronicle of German women's emancipation. Under Funke's ownership, Brigitte continues to set the standard for the German women's fortnightly — the Leitmedium of its segment, now in its second century.