Glossed Over

The Week: What Didn't Happen on Glossy Paper

Here’s what else happened this week:

Glossed Over—that’s right, the very website you’re reading now—has joined the legions on MySpace. Validate us by adding us to your friends list.

Fashion experts decreed in the New York Times that the wardrobe in The Devil Wears Prada is not even close to what actual people who work in fashion wear. Of course, one of the more outspoken critics was Elle’s Anne Slowey, and we trust her judgment about as much as we trust that Anna Wintour is nothing like TDWP’s Miranda Priestly.

Jossip got hot and bothered about the prospect of eating pizza with Brandon Holley. We’d like to attend so we can query the Jane editor-in-chief about her drinking habits. Think that’s the kind of feedback she’s looking for?

And finally, The Devil Wears Prada hits theaters today. We can’t wait to see if the whole thing is more palatable on film than it was on paper—and to check out that wardrobe for ourselves.  We’ll be sure to discuss it next week. See you then!

Vogue: Inspiring Disgust...and a Dream

From Vogue’s “Self-Service,” July, wherein writer Sarah Brown is scorned—and, geez, practically ostracized—when she reveals that she does her own pedicures. Gasp!

The writer Marina Rust, who describes herself as “pretty low-maintenance, but not when it comes to pedicures,” falls into this camp. “It would save so much time and aggravation, but I can’t make my nails look the way they do at Angel Nails, and I don’t use anything more than the wimpiest pale-pink polish,” she lamented. “I hope I’m good at other things.”

We hope you’re good at other things, too, Marina. Those skills may be your ticket out of the strange and cruel world you inhabit, a world where your self-worth would be solely determined by your ability to paint your own toenails—if anyone would even deign to do such a thing.

The article’s author also faces unjustified snippiness for her Sunday-night-at-home ritual:

“You do your own toes?” hissed a dissenter…curling her lip in disgust. “I would never.”

And:

“Do it yourself? No way! My mother taught me that some things are best done by a professional—hair, brows, skin, nails.”

It may not make sense, but at least dividing the world into these two camps—the salon-goers and the home-pedicure practitioners—allows the hissers to instantly ascertain everything they need to know about a person. Salon-goer? You’re in! Scrub your soles at home? Sorry, you’ve drawn the short straw.

Oddly, rather than promoting the luxury and ease of a salon job, Vogue then offers instructions on performing a passable self-pedicure, which we’d thought was as likely as the magazine featuring clothes from Forever 21 in a fashion spread. For the relatively rarified Vogue, this may be the equivalent of fomenting a revolution—albeit a really insignificant one.

It gives us hope.  Close your eyes for a moment and ponder Vogue’s bold move. Imagine a world where wealthy women with too much free time don’t judge people on the status of their toenails, but on the content of their, um, wardrobes. We can only dream.

Looking for Britney on Bazaar?

Looking for Britney’s nude cover shoot for Bazaar? Click here.

Oh, and stick around for a while.  Brit’s not the only famous person who’s earned our derision.

Interviews Expose Duff's True Talent: Talking Trash

From Self’s “The Right Duff,” July:

[Hilary Duff] recently got a glimpse…after playing a hometown concert in Houston, where she reconnected with old acquaintances. “It’s scary to see some of them now. They work so hard to be the same as one another. They all do the same things and get into trouble because they’re bored,” she says. “I’m so much more my own person now.”

One more way all of Hilary’s old friends are the same? They’ve been dissed in print by Little Miss Individualist. Guess being your own person means it’s totally fine to announce to a reporter how much better you are than all your old friends.

But it’s not like Self had the exclusive on Hilary’s trash-talking. The teen sensation had some harsh words for those same erstwhile pals in Elle’s “Triple Platinum Blond,” July:

“It’s hard having a boyfriend who’s older because people just assume,” Hilary says. “But [virginity] is definitely something I like about myself.”

Oh, yeah, she dropped that bombshell. Anyway:

“…It doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about sex, because everybody I know has had it and you want to fit in. But when they talk about it, it doesn’t sound special, like you would imagine it to be. It just seems like everybody has slept with each other—you know what I mean.”

She’s talking about old friends in Texas…

Well, what did she expect? Didn’t she just say that her friends were all alike?

We hate to encourage a starlet’s newly minted bad attitude—Lindsay Lohan, we’re talking about you—but in this case, it’s pretty much the only thing we find at all interesting about Hilary Duff. 

So, Self, Elle, and any other publication with an inkling to interview the young and famous: If you have to put teenagers on the cover, make sure they’re insanely catty. Otherwise, we just don’t care. Duff’s movies?  We’ve never seen a single one.   Duff’s music? It makes us want to stab freshly sharpened pencils into our eardrums. But Duff’s bitchy comments? We could read those all day.

Britney's Bazaar: Are We Supposed to Buy This?

We know we just wrote about the current issue of Bazaar (though we haven’t yet tackled Lindsay Lohan’s ludicrous interview), but we couldn’t resist commenting on what’s hitting newsstands next month: a nude and pregnant Britney Spears.

Um, Bazaar? While we bemoan the unnatural, unattainable thinness of models, this is not an acceptable alternative.

Via Gawker

W: How to Be Criminally Chic

From W’s “Hollywood’s Diet Drug,” July, about the spate of socialites and celebrities taking attention deficit hyperactivity disorder drug Adderall to stay slender:

“It’s much chicer to discreetly take an Adderall with a cosmo than it is to snort a line of coke off the toilet at Bungalow 8,” says another current social fixture.  “It really is a lady’s drug.”

So illegally obtaining and using a prescription drug is ladylike.  Got it.

Unfortunately, W didn’t weigh in on which other felonies are sufficiently proper for its readers to indulge in:  grand larceny?  arson?  kidnapping?  We may never know if our other less-than-legal habits would pass muster with W, which is too bad; even the criminal deserve to be as chic as possible.

Unless they’re snorting drugs off any kind of plumbing fixture.  Never mind criminal law—that’s a clear violation of the laws of style.

Drawing Inspiration from Unusual Sources at Glamour

From Glamour’s “Buzz,” July:

We’ve all suffered from a nasty case of excess eyeliner or mousse dependency. But somewhere on the way to the A-list, these celebs figured out what works. If they can, we all can!

Because if a starlet can manage a total makeover with only the meager assistance of a fashion stylist, makeup artist, hairstylist, and publicist, then it’s obviously simple enough for the rest of us to achieve on our own.

Bazaar: The Two Faces of Fur

From Bazaar’s “Summing Up the Season,” July, by Amy Larocca:

My pick is a Burberry Prorsum trench with fox-fur cuffs like a matching pair of bracelets. It’s elegant rather than bulky or barbaric. And if you can’t bear (or afford) a coat, there are always fur gloves: Devi Kroell’s mittens have silver-fox cuffs.

Whatever your stance in the debate over fur, this bit of spineless pandering on the subject makes no sense whatsoever. If you’re anti-fur, how are fur cuffs any more acceptable—or any less “barbaric”—than an entire coat made of the stuff? And if you “can’t bear” a coat, why would your conscience let you wear the gloves? A sensible alternative would have been to suggest a brand that offers faux-fur accessories rather than styles that use less of the perhaps-objectionable material.

Or, even more sensible, Bazaar shouldn’t try to have it both ways. Trying (albeit weakly) to appease the animal-rights crowd while featuring several photos of models in fur? Talk about barbaric.

Ashlee Simpson: Nothing to Say to Marie Claire Or Anyone Else

We’re not ones to give magazines the benefit of the doubt, so we’re just going to come out and say it: the Ashlee Simpson feature story in July’s Marie Claire must be some kind of a sick joke. Either that, or we’re the only ones who didn’t get the memo about this being a massive War of the Worlds-style attempt to fool the public.

Let’s start at the beginning.

Ashlee Simpson’s Body Language

She’s had it with Hollywood’s twisted view of feminine beauty. Her goal: to get women to appreciate their diverse shapes and sizes…

Now, we know Ashlee apparently appreciates her own, um, shape and size. Except for her nose, of course. 

There’s nothing wrong with nose jobs or plastic surgery per se, but it’s hypocritical to fix yourself up with the help of a surgeon and then claim to be some sort of activist for self-acceptance. Her message, unfortunately imparted to the high school girls she’s paired with for this piece, boils down to something like this: “Hey, girls, love yourselves! Don’t listen to what the media says is beautiful! Unless you can afford surgery to fix your flaws, in which case, you totally should!”

And then there’s this description of Ashlee and the girls painting an empowering mural (in a studio, yet—what was the point of that? Like the models and photographers visiting an L.A. photo studio are going to see the mural and somehow learn from it?):

Soon, messages of empowerment appear…Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” blasts through the room…

Oh, good song choice for the event, Marie Claire. ‘Cause, you know, lyrics like “You got the peaches/I got the cream” are incredibly uplifting. Women should appreciate their peaches, we guess.

Ashlee goes on to talk about her breasts—yawn—and relates a ridiculous anecdote about how her burgeoning eating disorder was remedied by a single trip to a steakhouse. Also, she complains that fighting with other women is just “catty girl stuff, totally embarrassing to be a part of.”

Which doesn’t quite explain why, as the article notes, she wrote a song with the chorus “I didn’t steal your boyfriend.” The fighting in public is unacceptable, but slamming your enemies in a TRL-approved single? Great!

Though the article is mercifully short, it is long on annoying. Passages like

…at 21, she has endured her share of disappointments, too…

and

Classic Ashlee: brash, irreverent, real.

make this article read a lot like a puff piece and not much like the supposedly serious issue-tackling article it was intended to be. But, considering the subject, perhaps we should be thankful it didn’t delve too deeply into the singer’s thought processes.

We’re not thankful, though, that Marie Claire didn’t seek out a more appropriate star to champion the subject of healthy body image. Seriously, was a 21-year-old pop star—who, let’s be honest, has a good body by most anyone’s standards—the best person to speak on this topic? Either she said a lot more that wasn’t included in the finished piece, or Ashlee’s publicist is an evil genius.

If the latter is the case (and we suspect it is), we expect to hear a lot more about young Ashlee’s trials and tribulations. Maybe her next interview will address the inner torture that she expresses by wearing black nail polish.

Allure: Beauty Fades and Brains Last, But Who Cares?

In the July issue of Allure, “Cute, Pretty, Or Sexy?” attempts to settle that raging debate once and for all. Carmen Electra is their visual aid of choice, gamely posing as each of the three—though her “cute” pose doesn’t make her look cute so much as it makes her look six years old—and the rest of Hollywood’s starlets are slotted into one of the three categories.

Kate Hudson? Cute. Sienna Miller? Pretty. Scarlett Johansson? Sexy. No surprises there.

We were fascinated by a paragraph at the end of the piece detailing the origins of the words “cute” and “pretty,” including the revelation that neither word initially related to appearance.

[“Cute”] was as an abbreviation of “acute” and meant sharp, cunning, or clever…“Pretty,” a much older part of the language, derives from an Old English word meaning crafty, artful, or astute.

But even this sweet etymology lesson doesn’t take the sting from the article’s inevitable conclusion:

“Pretty”…had, in other words, no relevance to pearly teeth, glossy hair, and apple cheeks, and everything to do with a woman’s wit. That’s a form of beauty upon which even the plainest of women can pride herself.

Oh, how generous of Allure to allow that even the “plainest” woman can pride herself on something! And how incredibly abhorrent to promote the idea that intelligence is merely a consolation prize for those not fortunate enough to fall into one of the three all-important forms of female attractiveness.

And we’re not just saying that because, according to the magazine’s formula, we’re “cute.” We’re not bitter.  Well, not bitter about being cute, anyway. Bitter in general? Well, yeah.  Have you read this site before?

Previously, Elle chose looks over logic: Business As Usual at Elle: Skinny Trumps Smart