Lucky Magazine May Finally Be Dead

The media brand formerly known as Lucky magazine may have finally bitten the dust. According to a report from Fashionista, The Lucky Group's handful of remaining staffers were let go last Thursday after "an expected sale failed to go through."

Although the company's CEO told Fashionista via email last week that "the Lucky Group continues to operate," no new content has been posted on the Luckyshops.com website in several days, nor have its social feeds been updated.

While rumors of Lucky's demise have been circulating for years, things had been looking up for the brand just two years ago, when the magazine underwent an Anna Wintour-led revamp that saw respected fashion publishing vet Eva Chen join Lucky as editor in chief. But the "new" Lucky failed to hit the right notes with readers or advertisers, and by summer 2014, owner Condé Nast decided to throw in the towel and spin off Lucky as an independent joint venture with e-commerce company BeachMint.

Christened The Lucky Group, the new company continued to publish Lucky magazine while also building a new shopping-meets-editorial site, Luckyshops.com, which officially launched this past February. Still, Lucky's downward spiral continued, with numerous editorial positions being cut. By April, both Chen and the company's president Gillian Gorman Round had officially exited. (Chen, notably, managed to reemerge unscathed as Instagram's director of fashion partnerships.)

In May, The Lucky Group underwent restructuring (and yet another round of layoffs) that slashed the magazine's print schedule to just four issues per year. The company also said it was in talks to be acquired by an outside investor and planned to make an announcement by summer. However, the next big news to come out of The Lucky Group, just a month later, was that print operations were being suspended indefinitely.

While Lucky has yet to officially shut down, without a magazine, live website or social media presence, it certainly seems the death knell has sounded.