Glossed Over

Editor's Note: Glossed Over Gets Hitched

You may have noticed we’ve been posting only sporadically these last few weeks.  That’s because—despite our best efforts—planning our wedding has insidiously taken over every free moment.  (No thanks to InStyle Weddings, either.)  Seriously, we cannot believe how much thought we’ve exerted on things like the arrangement of the ribbons on the bridal bouquet and how much time we’ve spent fielding questions about whether Capri pants are acceptable attire for the rehearsal dinner.  The giant wedding time-suck is made worse because important things like, you know, reading the new issue of Cosmo fall by the wayside.

The good news is, the planning is over.  That’s because the wedding is Sunday.

So we’re taking a break from the blog to fully enjoy the festivities and our honeymoon in Paris.   (So excited! And not just for French magazines!)  During our absence, in the probably vain hope of preventing rampant spamming, commenting will be restricted to those with a Typekey login.  We’ll be back to posting—and loosening the commenting reins—on Monday, October 15.  A bientot!

The Bridezilla image appears in several places, provenance unclear.  We found it here.

We Read It So You Don't Have To: Reese Witherspoon Won't Discuss Her Shoes With Elle

This is how “Wild at Heart,” Elle’s interview with Reese Witherspoon (October), begins: 

She has class, sass, and a gorgeous…laugh.  Reese Witherspoon is living proof that the South always rises again.

And this is the first paragraph in the story:

“The fact that you’re drinking is making me very, very happy,” Reese Witherspoon says, eyeing the glass of white wine on the table.  “I think it’s great to drink in the middle of the day.  I would join you, but I gotta drive to pick up the kids.  You’re taking taxis everywhere.  You could get drunk!”  This cracks her up.  “You could go from appointment to appointment highly, highly smashed!”

Uh, yeah, that’s hilarious. Where’s the class and sass?  Not on display in this article!  Instead, she comes off like...well, like writer Holly Millea had trouble getting her to discuss anything at all.

For instance:

“I am.  I’m fun.  I can be really fun.  I can tell we’d have a lot of fun if the tape was off.”

But, apparently, the recorder was on for an agonizingly long time.  We just can’t find the fun in this joke, which is oh-so-helpfully presented entirely without context:

“Why do Southern women make bad prostitutes?” she asks, answering: “’Cuz we have to write so many thank-you notes!”  This sends her into stitches.  It’s her mother’s favorite joke.  “And so true!”

We aren’t sure if we’re more confused by the punch line or by the appearance of “cuz” in print.

“I was excited for the red shoes [she wore to the Golden Globes],” admits Witherspoon, whose idea it was to wear them.  Asked why, she smiles like a cat and blinks.  “I don’t have a good answer for that.”

Why doesn’t she have an answer?  Probably because no one in the history of the celebrity profile has bothered to ask an Oscar-winning actress why she wanted to wear red shoes.   They were red!   Her dress was yellow!  The shoes and dress were color-coordinated, and the pairing was smashing.  That should be reason enough, and if it isn’t, we simply can’t muster up the energy to care why she chose those shoes.  Or is there some interviewer-interviewee subtext we’re missing?

Speaking of that Oscar…

“It’s real purty on my bookcase…”

“Purty”?

Want to know about Witherspoon’s childhood?  Here’s a charming story:

“My dad has pulled so many gross things out of ear canals,” she says, thrilling to the ickiness.  “You don’t want to know.  You wouldn’t want to sleep tonight.  Bugs!  Bugs!  They scrape on your eardums!”  With a crazed look she uses an index finger to illustrate.  “Can you imagine how excruciating that must be?”

Well, if reading about it is anywhere as excruciating as experiencing it…

And then there’s the closing quote.  Witherspoon is talking about Splendor in the Grass.  She’s quoted for several sentences in which she describes the end of the film, because, you know, revelations about a movie from 1961 will have to suffice in lieu of actual revelations about the subject of the profile.  Then she says this:

“You know when you realize that movies don’t always have happy endings and maybe that is a happy ending?”

And that’s the abrupt conclusion of the article, which was definitely a happy ending for us.

Fashion Mini Celebrates Ten-Year-Old Taste

You know, it’s pretty much par for the course that a magazine has the power to make us feel bad about ourselves.  Between the impossibly skinny models, their never-seen-the-sun skin, and our apparently inadequate earning power, reading a magazine can sometimes turn into a real battle with our self-esteem.  Last night, we were reading the October issue of Marie Claire, feeling pretty good about our bank balance—until we saw that a $295 Tory Burch dress listed as a “steal.”  Suddenly, our mood darkened.  A dress that costs a good deal more than our car payment?  Oh, sure, what a fantastic way to spend our hard-earned dollars!   But was the magazine’s perspective skewed, or are we simply not bringing home enough cash to finance a fashionable life?

Fortunately for our sense of self-worth, the page also suggested a $34.95 H&M dress.  (And we aren’t really in the midst of a magazine-induced personal crisis…yet.)  Still, we have to wonder who Marie Claire thinks is reading their magazine when such disparate price points are both considered bargains, but we’re digressing.

We’ve been reading fashion mags for the better part of our life (really!), which means we’ve absorbed plenty of stories about men, clothes, and money that don’t even approach our reality.  Still, we hadn’t yet read anything that made us feel like we were inadequate in our youth.  Until tonight, that is!  Who even knew that poor self-esteem could be retroactive?  Well, it’s totally possible!  How?  Well, the September Fashion Mini crowns actress Camilla Belle one of their fifty most stylish luminaries.  Then, horrifyingly, the issue confronts us with a detailed account of actress Camilla Belle’s preferences as a ten-year-old—taking us all the way back to 1997. 

Although that was the year we turned twenty-one, Belle’s means—not to mention her taste—were already well beyond our reach.  Reading her style picks, it becomes rather clear that some of us (and we do mean us) will never quite catch up with the magazine world’s favorite tastemakers.  Behind the jump, we compare our picks with Camilla’s, circa 1997.  Looks like we can blame our lack of Louboutins on our childhood!

Lucky: The Magazine About Shopping, Style, and Jean Godfrey-June

You know what we miss?  The days when Kim France could be reliably counted on for a self-indulgent editor’s letter.  Let’s be clear: we think her reigned-in notes are a huge improvement.  And we hope that means she’s happier with her life now that she doesn’t feel the need to spew personal details in every issue of Lucky.  But, honestly?  She was incredibly entertaining—albeit incredibly infuriating—back then.

Fortunately, Jean Godfrey-June has stepped into the role of resident staffer who shares life details for no apparent reason, and there's the added bonus for us that Godfrey-June rarely makes any sense!  At least France’s tangents were marginally related to the topic at hand.  Godfrey-June’s pieces, on the other hand, are often so random that we wonder whether anyone even edits her copy.  What, does she phone it in directly to the printer from the back of a speeding cab?

There’s an autobiographical tidbit in the October “Editor’s Letter,” in which France asks other staffers to share personal recollections about fragrance.  The editor-in-chief doesn’t even share her own story, which is amazing, because the old Kim France never bothered to ask about other people.  But here’s Godfrey-June’s answer:

In true Northern California late-‘70s style, my mother had a bottle of Zen by Shiseido, which I think all her cool, bohemian friends also wore—they had lives, and the Zen spoke to me of having a life.  It still smells really sexy to me.

Ah, yes, having a life.  Way to aim high, young Jean!  The concept—associating a scent with certain people—is sound, so it wasn’t until we got to “The Beauty Closet” that we began to suspect she had inhaled a bit too much of the Shiseido potion in her youth. 

For starters, she writes:

What would happen if you cracked open a Magic 8-ball? is my daughter’s favorite question.  Some old stale water, perhaps a bit of food coloring, and a many-sided piece of plastic emblazoned with “yes,” “most likely,” and “reply hazy, try again” is what you’d get, is my typical answer.

Which is level-headed and reasonable and everything…it just has absolutely nothing to do with anything else in the column.  Is it really such a stretch to fill the page?  She continues with a story about taking her kids to a press conference, which at least has the potential to be charming.  The key word here is potential.

Through some rather glamorous extenuating circumstances, [her “working-mom thing”] most recently broke down in Paris…

Glamorous circumstances!  What could those be?  Maybe she’s saving the story for a column in 2008, because she never explains why she was forced to drag her children to a cosmetics-industry press conference.   

At this point, we hoped (against hope, it turned out) the kids’ involvement would at least yield some adorable anecdote.  The quote below, however, is as close as the story veers to cute.

…my exceptionally short, unaccredited-journalist sidekicks were riveted.  Even the antiaging portion, which involved charts about cellular regeneration, was popular: “I loved that whole human-body part!” reminisced my five-year-old later, his eyes shining.

Yeah, yeah, the kid’s gonna grow up to be a doctor.  So what about the Magic 8-ball?

When [the Lancome Destiny Cube] appeared, however, the peanut gallery (myself included) went crazy.  While it’s not an 8-ball—

“Not an 8-ball.”  Uh, doesn’t that render the intro totally irrelevant? Unless...hmm...the cube and the 8-ball are both made of black plastic.  And they both have stuff inside.  So they’re, like, practically the same thing! 

it wears its mystery on the outside, with chic words like “coquette” and “jalouse” stamped on its facets, interspersed with moons and stars and secret symbols—when you crack it open, you get both a darkish-bright and a sparkly-translucent lip gloss, the palest pink and the faintest green eyeshadows, both so wearable as to entice a non-eyeshadow holdout.

If we managed to follow that extraordinarily long sentence correctly (and we think we did), we learned these three things:

1. It is possible for a substance to be both “darkish” and “bright” at the same time.

2. There are, apparently, people in the world who identify as “non-eyeshadow holdouts,” or shadow wearers have a name for those who abstain.  Either way, it’s weird.

And, perhaps most importantly,

3. Even if you connect two items that have only the vaguest resemblance, tell a story that fails to be interesting, and nullify your own premise, all in the name of a pricey product, you can still have a successful career in beauty writing.  Even a truly magic 8-ball couldn’t have predicted that.

Opting Out •  In the last month, we’ve received no fewer than 22 emails from different magazines. To be clear, we don’t mean hate mail; we mean the messages we receive because we subscribe.  Bazaar and Cosmopolitan have special invitations for us.  W really wants our feedback—so much so that on August 16 alone, they sent three separate messages imploring us to take their survey.  Self wants to make over our life.  Glamour wants to introduce us to Ciara.  (Who?)  InStyle wants us to renew, a fact they alerted us to by sending us an “urgent notice of expiration.”  As for us?  We’d like to stop receiving these messages.  Isn’t reading the actual magazines enough?

Scoping Out September Issues (Still): W

We know, we know.   This issue came out weeks ago, and we’re just now getting to it?   In our defense, it only showed up in the mail on Thursday.  This issue took ages to arrive, but at least our J. Crew catalogs arrive three times a week.  Sheesh.

All right…we might as well open the magazine.   After all, the October issue is probably going to show up any minute!

The issue weighs: 4.2 pounds

Issue thickness:  just over an inch

Who’s on the cover: Gwyneth Paltrow, looking how we imagine Donatella Versace looked thirty years ago—too much brow, too much blonde, too much bronzer.  Did Gwyn even look in the mirror before she stepped in front of the camera?

Who bought the back cover: Giorgio Armani.  The model’s wearing a shirt of paillettes and strange sleeves reminiscent of chain mail that aren’t even attached to the top.  We’ll cave to leggings long before we drop cash on woven metal sleeves.

Number of ad pages between the cover and the table of contents: The table of contents starts on page 112 and continues on 205—like the rest of the September issues, this tome is absurdly ad-heavy.

Total number of pages: 640!  It’s W’s biggest issue ever! Why, according to the cover, it’s

A Fall Fashion Bonanza

A bonanza of advertising, that is!  See below. 

How many of those pages are ads: 477, about 75 percent (source: MIN Online)

Subscription cards: Three bound.   We can deal.

Cosmetic samples: Daisy by Marc Jacobs.  Eh.  The ubiquitous Fendi Palazzo, about which we still aren’t convinced.  Viktor & Rolf Flowerbomb, which, yeah, lives up to its name.   That’s not a compliment.

Is it portable? We’ll just say that it felt more than a tad weird using our canvas Target tote to schlep a magazine that features a $22,650 crocodile bag.

Number of articles concerning the obscenely wealthy:  Oh, virtually all of them.   Our favorite (of the ones we bothered to read, because why torture ourselves?) was “Just Like Mom,” wherein young, super-rich women borrow clothes from their young-looking, super-rich moms.   Oh, fun!  It’s, like, recycling!

For one bash, Samantha pulled out a black and gold minidress that Jamee had donned for a New Year’s fete in Lyford Cay some thirty years ago.

Yep, totally quotidian.  Ready for the quote?

“Everyone was asking me, ‘Is that Prada?  Miu Miu?’  And it’s like, a $275 dress from Alexander’s, but it was just so incredibly chic.”

See, it’s nothing!   It’s just a dress that was crazy expensive when it was new a whole generation ago!  And that is why we eventually stopped reading the articles in this issue.

Not as annoying as we expected:  Gwyneth Paltrow’s interview.  That’s because it is actually, totally, definitively impossible to be more annoyed by her personality than we were by the photo of her feeding a rat with a sippy cup.  What the hell?

Exactly as annoying as expected: “Wild Roses,” shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott.  Because, you know, we don’t expect much from photo editorials that involve live poultry.

More annoying than we expected:  It’s a tie between the aforementioned crocodile bag and the $3,300 crocodile gloves.  For the woman who wants to spend exactly the same amount of her gloves as she did on her most recent lunchtime mini-lift.

Best pseudonym ever: Jinx Titanic, who suggested a Posh-Becks-Brad-Angelina foursome in a letter to the editor (page 304). Jinx may well be the most awesome person alive.  Update: Kate at Fishbowl LA writes that Jinx Titanic is a punk legend.  Which, yes, makes the letter even better.

America Ferrera on Glamour Cover: Digitally Created Déjà Vu

Here’s Ugly Betty star America Ferrera, painstakingly Photoshopped and sporting Versace on the cover of the October issue of Glamour.  That’s quite a juxtaposition of Ferrera's computer-slimmed figure with the headline “1st Annual Figure Flattery Issue!”  Well, whose figure wouldn’t be flattered by a digital diet? 

Also, we could swear we’ve seen that dress before.

Oh, that’s because we have!  Here’s Jessica Simpson wearing the same dress in a different hue (and with slightly different straps) from the August cover of Bazaar.

Our verdict?  We prefer the purple.  Also, we prefer that if a magazine is going to tell us how to “dress [our] body better,” that magazine might want to demonstrate by dressing an actual body for the cover.  Just a thought!

More Vogue: Grooming Habits of the Grossly Overprivileged

No, no, we’re not liveblogging the rest of Vogue.  (Sure, we’re masochistic for even trying, but we aren’t gluttonous enough to go at it again.) Anyway, the September issue is practically bursting with content from Plum Sykes, whom we love to loathe—three whole articles!  We’d only read her personal essay about her life-changing endeavor to wear brooches.  (Which we bemoaned at length in our live blog, mostly due to, well, its length.)

But there are two more pieces penned by Ms. Sykes in this issue!  First up, there’s a breathless account of a Manhattan hair atelier, “At the Parlor.”  The premise: stylist Ashley Javier caters to the wealthy and famous by cutting their hair in his penthouse apartment…on an invitation-only basis.   Oh, what a tempting glimpse at the services available to those with lots of money and nothing to spend it on but their tresses!  Still, those joining the exclusive ranks of Javier’s clientele may find his services rather challenging.  See, his clients must first wind their way through—gasp!—an unfashionable part of Manhattan!

There is a scruffy gray commercial building on the corner of Twenty-eighth Street and Fifth Avenue.  Devoid of glamour, it is situated on the kind of grim Manhattan intersection that can provoke clinical depression in even the cheeriest girl.

Well, we’re depressed by the prospect of a hair salon to which clients must be invited, but we don’t think that’s what Plum’s talking about.  And speaking of a downer:

Cuddling the Yorkie, [Javier] says the dog was “a gift from Jemma Kidd and Arthur Mornington.  He’s called Tennessee, but his middle name is Morningkidd.”

Seriously?  People give their dogs middle names?  Also, exclusive hairstylists apparently speak their own language:

When he arrived on Twenty-eighth Street, “This place was harrogatha!  Harrogatha!”

We do not know this word.  Anyone?

For good measure, one of our favorite quotes from the article!

He started decorating in earnest, and “my taste fell together.  If you want to get close to yourself, forget therapy.  Decorate.”

Even better is this gem from Chloe Sevigny:

“I need a snip.  I’m going out for dinner with Bill Paxton.”  Ashley explains that he only “dusts” Chloe’s hair.  “I don’t trust L.A. hairdressers,” she adds…

Must be difficult, not being able to find one single person to cut your hair in a metropolitan area of thirteen million people.  Who knew the Los Angeles area faced such a dire shortage of appropriately trained stylists?  Someone launch a charity event, quickly!

Finally, as Plum wraps up her stay at the penthouse/salon:

Ashley, still bubbling with infectious energy, exclaims, “Adios, Sugarpuss!’…

If only we could bid farewell to Sugarpuss Sykes!  Alas, we’ll be flipping to her third contribution to the September issue, “Village People,” to discover which part of the lives of the over-privileged she’ll illuminate for us next.  We have so much to learn!