About look!

look!

look! is a Viennese women's lifestyle and society magazine founded in 2014 by Uschi Fellner and published in Vienna by echo Medienhaus. It covers fashion, beauty, celebrities and society for women readers, and it belongs to the later phase of one of the most productive careers in Austrian magazine publishing. Fellner had already founded Woman, co-founded the news magazine News and founded the women's title Madonna before creating look!, and look! was conceived alongside the Bundesländerinnen, the family of regional women's magazines with which it is described as a sister project. This profile is deliberately careful: independent reference documentation for look! is considerably thinner than for Fellner's earlier, larger titles, and several details that circulate in listings rest on the original batch research and on biographical accounts of its founder rather than on a dedicated reference entry for the magazine itself. Where a fact rests only on that basis, this profile says so, and it does not invent circulation figures, staffing lists or a publication history that cannot be verified.

Uschi Fellner and the road to look!

To understand look!, it is necessary to understand its founder. Uschi Fellner is one of the defining figures of the Austrian magazine boom associated with the Fellner media family. Biographical and reference accounts credit her as the founder of Woman, launched in 2001 within the News group and long Austria's leading women's magazine, as a co-founder of News, the weekly news and society magazine first published in 1992, and as the founder in 2008 of Madonna, the weekly women's title of the Mediengruppe Österreich. That sequence matters because each title refined a formula: a strongly visual, celebrity-aware, service-rich women's magazine, edited with a clear sense of its reader's daily life, from fashion and beauty to health, food, work and relationships. When Fellner founded look! in 2014, she brought that accumulated experience to a new publishing home, echo Medienhaus in Vienna, rather than to the groups in which her earlier titles had appeared. Reference summaries therefore describe look! both as a women's lifestyle and society magazine in its own right and as a sister project to the Bundesländerinnen regional women's magazines, which share the same founding impulse of giving women readers a title made specifically for them, in their own city or region.

Founding in 2014 and the echo Medienhaus setting

The founding date of 2014 and the publisher, echo Medienhaus, are the fixed points recorded for look! in the research underlying this directory. The magazine is based in Vienna, Austria's magazine capital, where the great majority of national titles are edited and printed. No separate, detailed founding history, such as a documented launch circulation, launch editor list beyond its founder, or a contemporary trade-press launch report, was located in independent reference sources during research for this profile, and none is invented here. What the date itself tells us is meaningful, however. By 2014 the Austrian print market was already contracting under digital competition, and launching a new women's print title in that environment was a statement of confidence in a loyal, older-skewing print readership and in the advertiser demand for fashion, beauty and lifestyle environments. Fellner's launches had repeatedly shown that a well-defined women's title could still find that audience. look! should therefore be read as a late, experience-led entry into a mature market, not as a start-up experiment, and its positioning alongside regional women's publishing reflects a strategy of sharing content, sales and reader knowledge across related titles.

What look! covers

The editorial territory of look! is the classic women's-magazine mix, described in directory listings as fashion, beauty and celebrities, within a broader lifestyle and society frame. In practice that means fashion pages presenting seasonal trends and wearable interpretations for its readers, beauty coverage of skincare, make-up and hair, society reporting on Austrian and international celebrities and on Viennese events, and lifestyle material on living, enjoyment and personal wellbeing. The title itself, look!, with its exclamation mark, signals the visual and style-led emphasis: the magazine is about how things and people look, and about helping readers shape their own look. Society coverage gives it a specifically Austrian flavour that imported international women's titles cannot offer, because the events, designers, presenters and public figures it follows are those its readers recognise from Austrian television, theatre and public life. At the same time, the absence of a large, independently documented digital footprint in reference sources suggests a title whose centre of gravity is print and its established readership, rather than a digital-native brand competing for social-media reach with younger titles such as miss.

The Bundesländerinnen connection

Reference summaries explicitly link look! to the Bundesländerinnen, the regional women's magazines for Austria's federal states, describing look! as a sister project to them. That connection is important for understanding both its production model and its place in the market. Regional women's magazines adapt the national women's-magazine formula to a single Bundesland, with regional society, regional fashion retail, regional events and regional personalities, and they are typically read as community titles as much as lifestyle titles. A Viennese sister title fits naturally at the centre of such a family: Vienna material can be shared, production and design resources can be pooled, and advertisers can buy national-plus-regional combinations. For this profile, the exact corporate and contractual structure of that sister relationship has not been independently documented in the sources consulted, and it is therefore described only at the level at which reference summaries support it. Readers should not assume a single shared newsroom or a single owner for all of the titles without further evidence; the verified point is the editorial kinship and the shared founding figure.

Women's magazines in Austria and look!'s place among them

Austria supports a crowded women's-magazine segment relative to its population of about nine million. At the time look! appeared, readers could choose Woman, the market-defining title Fellner herself had founded; Madonna, her later weekly; Wienerin, the Styria monthly; miss, aimed at a younger reader; Diva, a glossy fashion and society title appearing about nine times a year; moments, with Styrian origins and regional editions; and the regional Bundesländerinnen themselves, alongside German women's titles circulating in Austria and international editions such as L'Officiel Austria. In that company, look! competed on familiarity and trust: a known editor's name, a clear promise of fashion, beauty and society, and a Viennese identity. It did not seek to reinvent the category, and there is no evidence in reference sources that it claimed a youth, feminist or luxury niche distinct from its founder's established formula. Its differentiation was execution and personality rather than concept, which is typical of late entries into mature magazine categories and makes the editor's reputation itself the brand.

Print in a contracting market

Any profile of an Austrian magazine founded in 2014 must reckon with the market it entered. Print circulations across Austria had been falling for more than a decade, advertising was migrating online, and younger readers in particular were forming habits on phones and social platforms rather than at the newsstand. Women's lifestyle content was among the most contested online, offered free by portals, influencers and international brands. Titles that survived in print did so by serving readers who still preferred a curated, finished magazine, by offering advertisers a defined and affluent audience in a brand-safe environment, and by extending into events and regional editions. look! belongs to that survival logic. Its association with regional women's publishing and with society coverage gave it content that global platforms could not easily replicate, because a Viennese society photograph or a regional fashion retailer is of interest mainly to the community it depicts, and that community still values seeing itself in print. This context is general market background, not a claim about look!'s individual commercial performance, for which no audited figures were located during research.

Frequency, format and availability: the limits of the record

Unlike many Austrian titles, look! does not have a widely reproduced reference entry setting out its frequency, page format, price history and audited circulation in the sources consulted for this profile. Directory research for this rollout recorded it as a Vienna women's magazine founded in 2014 by Uschi Fellner and published by echo Medienhaus, and that is the verified core. This profile therefore does not state a definitive issue frequency, a print run or a readership figure for look!, because none could be verified from an authoritative source, and inventing such figures would mislead directory users. Readers who need current frequency, subscription terms or advertising rates should consult the publisher directly, since those details can also change over a title's life. The same caution applies to the magazine's present status: research did not locate a reference source announcing a closure, a relaunch or a change of publisher for look!, so it is described here in the terms in which it was founded and listed, without speculation about later developments that cannot be documented.

The Fellner formula in women's publishing

Because look! is inseparable from its founder, its editorial character is best described through the formula Fellner's titles share, while recognising that issue-by-issue documentation of look! itself is limited. That formula combines prominent cover personalities, accessible fashion and beauty service, society photography, and a tone that is glamorous but familiar, inviting the reader into a world she partly recognises. Woman under its founding editor set the Austrian benchmark for that approach in the two-thousands, and Madonna carried a weekly, more society-heavy version of it from 2008. look!, founded six years after Madonna, can reasonably be understood as a further application of the same instincts by the same editor in a new house. This is an analytical description based on the founder's documented body of work, not a claim drawn from a complete archive of look! issues, and it is presented as such. Where a directory user needs certainty about a specific feature, column or editor of look!, the magazine's own issues and the publisher are the authoritative sources.

Vienna as editorial home

Vienna is more than a postal address for look!. The capital concentrates Austria's fashion retail, beauty industry, theatres, television production, charity balls and society events, and a women's lifestyle and society magazine edited there sits at the source of its material. Society coverage in particular depends on physical presence: photographers and reporters at openings, premieres, fashion presentations and benefits. Being published by a Viennese house, echo Medienhaus, placed look! inside that circuit. Vienna is also the largest single market for women's magazines in Austria and the centre of national advertising, so a Vienna base served both editorial and commercial purposes. At the same time, the Bundesländerinnen connection acknowledged that women's-magazine reading in Austria is strongly regional, and that a capital title alone does not exhaust the opportunity. The combination of a Viennese flagship sensibility with regional sister titles is the structural idea behind the project as reference summaries describe it.

How to read this profile

This profile has intentionally separated three levels of knowledge. First, the verified core: look! is a women's lifestyle and society magazine based in Vienna, founded in 2014 by Uschi Fellner, published by echo Medienhaus, covering fashion, beauty and celebrities, and described as a sister project to the Bundesländerinnen. Second, the documented context: Fellner's founding of Woman in 2001, her co-founding role at News, her founding of Madonna in 2008, and the crowded, contracting Austrian women's-magazine market into which look! was launched. Third, the openly acknowledged gaps: no verified circulation, frequency history, staff list or closure or relaunch notice was found in independent reference sources. A directory that aims at accuracy is more useful when it marks those gaps than when it fills them with plausible invention, and future research with access to the publisher's archive or to Austrian trade-press records could properly extend this account.

Significance of look!

The significance of look! lies less in scale than in what it represents: the persistence of the editor-led women's magazine in Austria well into the digital era, and the remarkable continuity of one editor's career across four decades of that market. A founder who had already created or co-created three major titles chose in 2014 to create another, in a new publishing house, alongside a regional women's-magazine family. Whether measured by its fashion and beauty pages, its society coverage or its place in the Fellner body of work, look! documents a belief that Austrian women readers still wanted a magazine made for them, in their own capital, by an editor they knew. That belief, and the title that embodies it, earn look! its place in a complete directory of Austrian magazines, with the evidential limits of its record stated plainly alongside its verified facts.