Willie Landels, who has died aged 94, had been at the London office of the supreme ad agency J Walter Thompson for years, art directing smooth, cool come-ons for consumables, such as Lux soap and Campari, before he was invited into the editorial side of magazines. Later he become the editor of Harpers & Queen, from its launch in 1970 until 1985.
The invitation came from Jocelyn Stevens, who in 1957 had spent an inherited small fortune buying the Queen, a publication with a dwindling dowager readership interested mostly in each other’s dowdy doings. Stevens abbreviated the name to Queen, targeted it at the Chelsea set – young, entitled but not always titled, and, if not monied, capable of making or marrying money – and brought in Mark Boxer as art director and Beatrix Miller as editor. They restyled it as a glossy in which the editorial content looked and read as sharply as the best ads, which it began to attract, along with creative talent.
