The Print Comeback in the Age of the Scroll
Luxury brands are investing in print magazines again, and it’s not nostalgia. As digital content becomes infinite and disposable, a printed page has become something rarer: a curated, collectible object that signals permanence and taste. Here’s why print never actually died, it just evolved from a mass information channel into a premium brand artifact worth designing, keeping, and displaying.
by Anamaria Roa
In 2026, Chanel launched Coco, a 115-page collector’s edition print magazine dedicated entirely to beauty, produced in partnership with British media brand Chaos. Eight different covers. A clear editorial vision. No product catalogue in sight. The House described it as a move to break free from traditional channels and set its own standards. Armani has done the same for years through Emporio, a biannual publication exploring architecture, design, and film. Dior has its own. Bentley Motors has had a quarterly since 2003.
This is not a print revival story. Print never left. It changed what it was for.
The Object
The shift is in the object itself. For most of the 20th century, a magazine was a disposable thing. You read it, you left it on a plane, you threw it away. The value was in the information inside, and information is now everywhere, available instantly, for free. A magazine can no longer compete on that basis. The ones that are growing understand this. Print stopped being the fastest and cheapest medium for the masses and became something else: a premium, curated, collectible object.
The Numbers
58% of Chanel’s beauty media coverage in the first half of 2025 came from print outlets alone, the highest proportion among the top ten beauty brands tracked. Print signals something digital increasingly cannot: Attention and permanence. A page that took months to design, photograph, and produce tells a different story than a post that took three minutes.
The Logic of Scarcity
What brands have understood is that scarcity creates meaning. Digital is infinite. Print is finite. A limited-edition issue, a numbered print run, a publication that arrives twice a year rather than every hour, these are objects worth keeping. Worth displaying. Worth passing on. The magazine on the coffee table has transformed into a statement about what the person who put it there values and how they want to be seen.
This is the same logic that made vinyl records valuable again when streaming made music weightless. When everything is available all the time, the thing you have to hold becomes rare. Rarity becomes worth something. Worth becomes collectible.
The Artifact
The brands getting this right are treating print as an artifact rather than a marketing strategy.
Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in St. Moritz produces Tower Revue, distributed at the hotel and mailed to returning guests. Rather than selling something, it extends the experience of the place into the hands of people who have been there and want to return.
Acne Studios publishes Acne Paper, an oversized cultural publication that reads more like an art book than a brand document.
The logic is the same across all of them. In a world saturated with content, the most powerful thing a brand can produce is something worth keeping. Something that sits on a shelf and says something about the shelf it sits on.
Print grew up. The brands that understood that first are already ahead.
