Media Headliner: How to pull off selling luxury in the credit crunch.(Harper's Bazaar )

Harper's Bazaar has survived two world wars and it will overcome this latest hurdle, Tess Macleod-Smith tells Anne Cassidy.

It was over coffee at Claridge's that Tess Macleod-Smith and Lucy Yeomans first plotted how they would bump off the Queen. To clarify, the pair in question weren't members of an uncommonly glamorous anti-monarchist group, but the publishing director and the editor of The National Magazine Company's once rather fusty Harpers & Queen.

The aim was to wrench the magazine away from the twin-set-and-pearls-clad county set, inherited from Harper's Bazaar's merger with the society magazine Queen in 1970, and catapult it into a cosmopolitan, fashion-focused and more meritocratic world.

Thanks to Macleod-Smith, Queen is long dead, and two years since its relaunch, Harper's Bazaar is looking healthy, recording its 11th consecutive ABC rise this year, up 3.1 per cent to 109,146.

Macleod-Smith, the publishing director of NatMags' luxury group, is sitting in her elegant white office sipping green tea (she spurns coffee these days), looking every inch the fashion-forward luxury market guru that she is. She is recovering from a lavish Bond-themed party thrown the night before by the other title in her luxury stable, Esquire. No evidence of the global financial meltdown here then.

'There is so much depressing news about the credit crunch, it felt like people had dressed up and gone out to party. I think it will be the same for our type of magazines next year as well. It felt like a bit of escapism,' she says.

While Macleod-Smith accepts that 2009 presents 'challenges', she maintains that the luxury sector is fairly recession-proof. And it's all down to choosing the right handbag, apparently. 'In a crisis, people tend to trade up or trade down, which is why there are so many Primark bags around. Certainly, our readers become more intelligent shoppers. It becomes more about investment in purchases. Instead of buying lots of bags, they buy one very good quality bag,' she says.