Best and Worst Selling 2011 Fashion Magazine Covers

>> Vogue was the only American fashion magazine to show a newsstand sales increase in the first half of 2011, thanks to its March Lady Gaga cover. The pink-haired Gaga image drove sales up by more than 100,000 copies over the March 2010 Vogue issue, which featured Tina Fey on the cover; and overall, the magazine averaged 360,000 copies at the newsstand during the first half of this year, up 12.7 percent.

Harper's Bazaar, meanwhile — which was up 10 percent during the first half of last year when the rest of fashion magazines were down — dropped 14.3 percent to 137,117. “It would be a lot easier if we could feature proven sellers like Jennifer Aniston or Gwyneth Paltrow on the cover every month, but we took some risks this year and tried stars that were a little outside of the norm for us, and they didn’t always translate into newsstand sales,” editor-in-chief Glenda Bailey admitted. Among those departures: Julianna Margulies for January 2011, Kim Kardashian for March 2011, and Courteney Cox for April 2011.

W — which has never relied on newsstand sales — was down 11.8 percent to 19,006, and Elle was down 9 percent to 250,056. See the big four's best and worst-selling covers for the first half of 2011 in the slideshow.