Sometimes I go and sit in a meeting room and I am surrounded by white middle-class executives and I wonder ‘What

“Sometimes I go and sit in a meeting room and I am surrounded by white, middle-class executives, and I wonder, ‘What planet have these people come from?’”But the black and minority ethnic media need to raise their game too, he says. “We kind of assembled 20 fun, interesting people and I really wanted them to reflect the spirit of Harper’s Bazaar,” is how the editor describes this exercise.Readers will be treated to this upmarket version of Celebrity Love Island, featuring the likes of the actors Saffron Burrows and Natascha McElhone, the artist Marc Quinn, the hat designer Philip Treacy and other celebrities including – once again – Vivienne Westwood. The latter, says Yeomans, “had never been on a beach before, which was fun, confiscating her shoes so she could feel the sand between her toes”.Yeomans, consummate networker that she is, once threw a party at Claridge’s for David Bailey and was thrilled that by the end of the evening Kate Moss was lying atop a piano that was being tinkled by Ronnie Wood. I would say we are more similar to Vogue than we are to Tatler.”The March issue of Harper’s Bazaar will contain something of a Flash special, Yeomans having managed to “entice” a group of celebrities to spend some time together in the Maldives.

“We are written about in the same breath [as Tatler], and it’s really important for us to distinguish ourselves. This is a subtle change, but I think still impactful enough.”The name Bazaar will instead be drip-fed to readers through the inside pages, with sections and supplements being re-christened as Bazaar Business, Bazaar Bags and Shoes, etc. The effect of all this, Yeomans says, is to drive home the message that the magazine is no longer a posh people’s journal.Despite all her efforts of the past two years, including axing Betty Kenward’s Jennifer’s Diary column in favour of a less snooty affair called Flash, penned by Stephanie Theobald, much of the media, and indeed the magazine-buying public, continues to regard Harpers & Queen as tailored for a privately educated elite. There has been a lot of speculation about whether we are going to go for a big Bazaar logo. That move brought derision from Vogue, whose editor, Alexandra Shulman, accused her rival of being embarrassingly “derivative” and “unoriginal”.Other than the name change, this latest redesign is also less than radical. For a start, whereas the US and other editions are known by the shorthand “Bazaar” and use that name in big type beneath a much smaller “Harper’s”, the UK edition will present itself the other way round, in order not to offend the sensibilities of existing readers, who tend refer to the magazine simply as “Harpers”.Yeomans says: “Our existing readers are so key to us and we have really done everything we can to make them feel as much part of this change as possible.

Circulation is up into six figures (from 85,000 when she took over) and next week’s six-monthly ABC will be the best Harpers & Queen ever managed. Advertising revenue is up 62 per cent year on year.So the radical step of changing the name of the magazine now is being taken from a position of strength.Harper’s underwent a more subtle makeover two years ago, a modest repositioning away from the Chelsea-set turf of Tatler and a raising of its game in the area of fashion coverage. “Although I think there are a lot of elements to the magazine that make us a different proposition.”Rumours of the name change have been bubbling for years, but the National Magazine Company has, until now, not been able to bring itself to take the plunge. This is partly a result of Yeomans’ success in the five years she has been editing the magazine.