Fashion-focused readers might have noticed something different in the Globe and Mail this weekend. The annual TIFF edition of the paper’s weekly Globe Style section featured some new looks, new personalities and new options for advertisers that are setting the tone going forward.

The changes to the overall look of the section are going to be subtle, maintaining its glossy, magazine-style paper with a tweaked logo that aims to be more in line with the rest of the paper and a “refresh” of the section’s existing graphic style.

The more prominent shift is in the content, bringing back popular columnists like Fashion Television host Jeanne Beker and adding ones with existing followings like former National Post fashion columnist Nathalie Atkinson.

“[Globe Style] hasn’t had much of a refresh since [the launch in 2010], so it was time to give it something of a fresh look,” Sean Humphrey, VP of marketing at the Globe and Mail, tells MiC. “It will hopefully also cement it as the authority and the trendsetter within the industry.”

Editorially, Globe Style will still focus on its pillars – personal style and entertaining – but is expanding the “trend-spotting” content and bringing the society section, which had previously only been in the Toronto edition of the paper, to every version of the Globe.

“That was more reader-driven,” Humphrey says. “It’s an incredibly popular component of Globe Style in Toronto and online, but we’ve heard from people in places like Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton that scenes in other cities are equally vibrant. With us being a national brand, it was about how we could portray a real national offering covering the culture side of style.”

On the advertising side, the Globe launched a new, four-page centre spread for advertisers, the first of several new ad features for the section that will be announced as they roll out in the near future. Humphrey says the new spread is one way brands can cut through the clutter in Globe Style, which is easier in a 16- to 24-page section than in thick, ad-heavy fashion magazines.

Humphrey says that the section’s target audience has remained unchanged, going after a female reader between 30 and 40, although he adds that there is enough men’s fashion and entertaining content to appeal to the broader audience as well.

The new version of Globe Style launched in conjunction with the brand’s activation at TIFF this past weekend, which saw the paper giving out free snow cones from a food truck in addition to over 5,000 gift bags that contained the TIFF edition of Globe Style, the most recent issue of Style Advisor magazine and products from fellow sponsor L’Oreal. Humphrey says Globe Style returned to TIFF for the seventh year in part due to overlap between target audiences.

“The 35- to 54-year-old professional Torontonian is who TIFF draws, someone that’s out and about wants to be part of the crowd,” he says.