It may seem a huge leap from the Dundee, Scotland, headquarters of the Beano comic to the international glamour circuit, but in the world of glossy magazines anything is possible, and it was a move that Fiona Macpherson, who died on November 28th aged 60, took in her stride.
Fiona Macpherson, who was editor of the upmarket Harper's and Queen for the past six years, began her career with the publishing house D.C. Thomson, in Dundee. It was the late 1950s, a period when the stirrings of what would become the teen market prompted the earliest magazines aimed specifically at under-18 girls.
She worked for one of those initial successes, Diana, as a sub-editor. A decade later, she would be in the London offices of National Magazines, putting together pages on high fashion and high society.
Fiona Macpherson was born in London, but her family moved to Inverness when she was five. She attended the Inverness Royal Academy, then studied English and modern history at St Andrews University and took a post-graduate course at Edinburgh University before starting at Thomson's.
In 1963, she joined Woman's Own magazine in London. Two years later, she became a subeditor and then arts editor of Queen. In 1970, Queen was taken over by Harper's, the offshoot of America's Harper's Bazaar; Fiona Macpherson became deputy editor of the newly amalgamated titles.
In 1993, after a 17-year break to have a family and freelance, she was brought back to Harper's as editor by the management of National Magazines, who admired her style, her strength in the features field, and her encouragement of new writers, photographers and illustrators. It was, for example, Fiona Macpherson who convinced Patric Walker to become a magazine astrologer.
She was particularly good at getting a different angle on profiles of the famous - the current Christmas issue, for instance, has Nanette Newman writing personal recollections of Katharine Hepburn.
Colleagues recalled that Fiona Macpherson handled herself in a self-contained manner, although she could be acerbic and also charming. A very private person, she was aware that the world Harper's reflected was dangerously seductive, and she avoided getting too drawn in.
When attending fashion shows abroad, she would immediately exchange her catwalk seat for a bike, and career around the streets with fellow journalists; out-of-hours party invitations would be turned down in favour of the early-evening train to Bath and a comforting supper of shepherd's pie and peas with her family.
Despite the shift the magazine made towards a younger audience under Fiona Macpherson's editorship, some things remained sacrosanct: summer was still "the end of the party season", readers could still thrill to the temptation of nipping off for jewellery to Geneva or New York. And Jennifer's Diary continued its quaint custom of describing partygoers who were not "right honourable", with the prefix Miss, Mr or Mrs.
Fiona Mary Macpherson: born 1940; died, November 2000