About Nova

Nova

Nova was a British glossy women's monthly magazine published in London, England, by George Newnes, part of the International Publishing Corporation (IPC), from March 1965 to October 1975. It described itself at launch as “a new kind of magazine for the new kind of woman”, cost three shillings, and lived up to the claim: The Times later described it as a politically radical, beautifully designed, intellectual women's magazine. A brief revival in 2000–2001 lasted thirteen issues.

Nova is written about here in the past tense. It closed in 1975, but its reputation has grown since: a collected volume of its pages was reissued in 2019, exhibitions have celebrated it, and design historians routinely place it among the most influential British magazines of the twentieth century.

An experiment for intelligent women

Nova began as an experiment. George Newnes decided in 1964 that a new kind of magazine was needed, without knowing exactly what it should be. Harry Fieldhouse became the new magazine's first editor and Harri Peccinotti its first art director. Peccinotti later explained the thinking: there were no magazines at the time for intelligent women, the women's liberation movement was strong and there were many good women writers, and the aim was to talk about what women were really interested in — politics, careers, health and sex. Newnes put up money simply to see whether anyone was interested in such a magazine, and the team was given a free hand.

The first issue appeared in March 1965. The launch did not quite work in its initial form, and in September 1965 Dennis Hackett, then deputy editor of Queen, was appointed editor from the seventh edition, with Kevin d'Arcy as assistant editor, Peccinotti as art editor and Alma Birk as editorial adviser. Hackett assembled a highly talented team and offered them the editorial freedom to be as daring and different as they liked — the condition, those involved recalled, under which Nova found its identity.

Subjects other women's magazines would not touch

Nova covered subjects that were once taboo in women's magazines: abortion, cancer, the birth control pill, race, homosexuality, divorce and royal affairs. It countered the typical view of what a women's magazine should be; there were no recipes and no knitting patterns. Instead it treated current affairs and politics as women's subjects, and fashion as a matter of intelligence and visual wit rather than instruction.

That editorial stance reflected the lives its readers were actually beginning to lead. The women of Nova's era were going out to work in greater numbers, exploring their own sexuality and realising their potential and intelligence, against a background that ran from the Angry Young Men of the 1950s to the full flowering of feminism and women's liberation in the late 1960s and 1970s. Nova's radical approach to female liberation also aroused men's curiosity, and it became famous in publishing circles as a women's magazine said to have more male readers than female — an aspect, some accounts argue, of its financial difficulties during the economic crisis of the 1970s.

Design, typography and photography

Nova's visual output was as ambitious as its writing. It showcased photography by Terence Donovan, Helmut Newton and Diane Arbus, and work by illustrators and artists including Alan Aldridge, Peter Blake and Roger Law. David Hillman, art editor from 1969 to 1975 and also deputy editor, described a design process in which the first question was always one of format: whether a subject would work best as a photographic essay, an illustration, an article, or all three — with pictures able to stand alone under a well-written caption, a method Nova inherited from the Sunday Times, instigator of the picture essay.

The distinctive Nova headline font, adapted by Pentagram from a vintage woodcut typeface, became a formative influence on typography for years. Nova took specific inspiration from the admired German magazine Twen and belonged to a revolution in graphic design led by Town, Queen, Elle and The Sunday Times Magazine. Between 1966 and 1969 Derek Birdsall, John Blackburn and Bill Fallover continued expanding the role of the magazine art director, on some titles becoming as powerful as the editor. In the early 1970s Nova featured experimental, impressionistic fashion photographs by Helmut Newton, Don McCullin, Hans Feurer and Terence Donovan.

Fashion at Nova

Fashion was central, but handled unconventionally. Penny Vincenzi, and later Molly Parkin and Caroline Baker, served as fashion editors. Parkin, who trained as a painter, was credited in the magazine's own anthology with a dynamic sense of colour and design, unfettered by the accepted wisdom of the fashion system, who introduced an unconventional and startling view of what women could wear, always teasing the edges of taste, and set the standard for Nova fashion.

Harri Peccinotti became one of the first professional photographers to use black models extensively in his fashion shoots, a practice now recognised as pioneering. Covers from the magazine's run — including a notorious 1971 cover and flip-book feature for an article on how to undress in front of one's husband — show how far Nova's stylish and provocative cover images pushed the boundaries of the women's glossy.

Writers and regulars

Long-form contributors to Nova included writers as notable and disparate as Graham Greene, Lynda Lee-Potter, Christopher Booker, Susan Sontag, Kenneth Allsop, Robert Robinson and the food writer Elizabeth David. Irma Kurtz served as agony aunt, and the astrologer Patric Walker made his name in its pages under the name Novalis. Nova also published the autobiographical writing of Arthur Hopcraft, later expanded into his 1970 book The Great Apple Raid. Illustrators included Mel Calman and Stewart Mackinnon.

That contributor list explains Nova's intellectual reputation. A women's monthly that could publish Greene and Sontag, employ one of the era's best-known agony aunts and astrologers, and commission Don McCullin — a photographer associated with war reporting — for fashion work, was deliberately collapsing the boundaries between the women's page, the literary review and the photo magazine.

The 1970s, decline and closure

Nova shone for most of its ten years. Its final years, however, were lived in the economic crisis of the 1970s, with its editorial freedom gradually reined in and its bold format diminished. The mismatch between its reputation and its economics — a relatively small, disproportionately male readership for a women's title, expensive design and photography, and an advertising market that preferred more conventional women's magazines — made it vulnerable. The final issue appeared in October 1975, ten years and seven months after the first.

Dennis Hackett, the editor who defined Nova in its formative period, died in 2016; his Guardian obituary rehearsed the same paradox that marked the magazine, of critical glory and commercial fragility.

The 2000 revival

IPC revived Nova in May 2000 as a fashion magazine, through a joint venture with Groupe Marie Claire, with a high-profile launch including television advertising. The revival lasted just thirteen issues, closing with the June 2001 issue. Launch editor Deborah Bee left abruptly after only three issues; her replacement Jeremy Langmead, previously of the Sunday Times Style magazine, increased the fashion focus but could not increase readership. The title's only ABC audit recorded a circulation of 75,000, the lowest in the monthly women's titles sector, and IPC management closed it as commercially unviable while praising the original's ground-breaking style.

The revival's failure confirmed that Nova's magic had been of its moment: the combination of liberation politics, design experiment and editorial freedom that was radical in 1965 could be imitated in 2000, but not recreated as a commercial proposition.

Books, exhibitions and remembrance

Nova's afterlife has been rich. David Gibbs edited a comprehensive anthology of Nova pages and images, Nova 1965–1975, compiled by David Hillman with photography by Harri Peccinotti, first published in 1993 and reissued in September 2019 with a new introduction. The Women's Library mounted a “Remembering Nova” exhibition from March to August 2006, at which The Times called it the greatest magazine of all time in its coverage. Design Week has repeatedly returned to Nova in assessing how it changed the landscape for women's magazines, interviewing Hillman about its covers and methods.

Original issues are collectable; auction sales of runs of 1970s Novas describe its controversial subjects and its photography by Newton, McCullin and Donovan for new audiences. In 2024 the songwriter Guy Chambers released a track entitled “Nova” marking the content and existence of the magazine — a small but telling sign that its name still signifies a moment of cultural daring.

Legacy

Nova's legacy is the proof that a women's magazine could be politically radical, intellectually serious and beautifully designed at the same time. It treated women as intelligent human beings interested in politics, careers, health and sex; it transformed magazine design through its typography, its picture essays and its art direction; and it widened fashion photography through Peccinotti's casting and the experimental work of its 1970s photographers.

That it lasted only a decade, failed commercially in revival, and yet is still exhibited, anthologised and argued about fifty years later, is the measure of its achievement. Nova did not survive the 1970s, but the modern intelligent women's magazine — and much modern magazine design — descends from it.