There's no such thing as Society

If you enjoy studying photographs of the glitterati at parties, then you're in luck: never have the newsstands been so crammed with pictures of the nobility and celebrities wielding champagne glasses. If the party pages of Vogue, Attitude or Hello! fail to meet your tastes, you can keep up with Baroness Bee Van Zuylen in The Field, or Tara Palmer-Tomkinson in the News of the World magazine. How, then, do the traditional "society" magazines - remnants of the days when Betty Kenward and Peter Townend held court - find a role in this cluttered media world?

It is a problem that, for the past year, has preoccupied Lucy Yeomans, the 31-year-old editor of Harpers and Queen. She admits that when she took over from Fiona Macpherson 12 issues ago, the magazine had an image problem: "It used to lag behind society," she says - historically targeting "the Home Counties ladies who lunch, aged 40 to 45". When, for instance, she asked the model Honor Fraser to pose for the cover, she was told that Harpers was "not her image". It was time to fight perceptions.

"I wanted to make a magazine that would define the New Establishment," she explains. As such, Harpers had to focus on "society with a small s" - the opinion-formers in whatever field, rather than those connected by family ties or money. "This group doesn't have a name - they're individuals," she says; people such as Barbara Amiel or Sam Taylor-Wood, "who do not just look stylish, but are also bright and smart and have an eclectic approach to life. The magazine is aimed at people like me - I want to know about parties, but I love fashion, the arts and current affairs."

She has introduced more fashion, and claims to have made Harpers "a lot trendier", moving the readers' age profile closer to 35 - whatever their class background. "The elite is more eclectic than it has ever been," Yeomans says. "It's not one class group, it's people who have influence. We want people at the cutting edge of society." Certainly, the advertisers seem happy: the February issue has 52 pages of display ads, from Armani to Tiffany, and 106 are promised for March, the biggest since March 1987. Harpers now claims "the highest AB profile of any magazine in Britain", with readers on an average income of £47,191.

But Yeomans's blatantly commercial approach makes some question whether Harpers has become just another celebrity-filled vehicle for fashion brands. Clive Aslet, editor of Country Life, has seen Harpers change. "It used to have a very strong identity, but that's been rather rubbed off," he says. "It's become much blander, to suit the advertisers - there's much more money around now from luxury-goods firms. In the ancient days it was quirky, sharp and spiky, with lots of unexpected things. Now it's much like everything else." By contrast, Tatler, Aslet believes, has retained a stronger, if more mercenary, identity - "it's targeting young rich people".

Geordie Greig, Tatler's editor, confirms-that his magazine is "undergoing-record profitability". Tatler may slightly lag behind Harpers' circulation - its audited total is 80,628 copies, compared with 88,059 for Harpers - but Greig claims a qualitative difference with his rival. "Half our readers are under 40, whereas Harpers and Queen are (still) basically the 50-plus, the Aga-saga Tetbury reader," he says. He accepts that Yeomans - once his deputy - "has made some improvements to Harpers. But if you read my interviews when I got this job, you'll find she's parroting the same things."

How, though, can the "posh" magazines (a word banned by Yeomans in Harpers) continue to prosper in New Labour's supposedly classless meritocracy? "Ben Elliot (Camilla Parker Bowles's nephew) might talk in mockney, but that doesn't mean he isn't from a grandish family," Greig says. "Look at the credits for EastEnders - there are three double-barrels in there. It's just that people are less concerned with that nowadays."