Glossed Over

Magazine Marriage Madness • What does Cosmopolitan consider the prime age for a marriage proposal? What did Allure’s second-time bride wear underneath her wedding gown? And what $950 bauble does W recommend for the “unconventional” bride? Find out all that, and more, in my index of June-issue intimacy advice on The Frisky.

Poverty Chic Puts New Perspective on Fashion Prices

Think designer clothes are too costly? Tired of being told by fashion magazines that a $1,500 trench coat is a worthwhile investment? You’re in luck! It’s officially hip to be poor!

Or, at least, it’s cool to be outrageously wealthy and merely dress like you’re poor. It’s like role-playing! Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, ever vanguards, flirted with dumpster chic in 2005, and Tyra Banks recently forced a whole coterie of models to pose as homeless. What’s behind this? Is it a reaction to the floundering economy or a misguided attempt at empathy?

Maybe it’s just the arrogance of people who’ve never sweated next month’s rent. Here’s Christina Applegate’s reminiscence of her child star days in “Christina Who?” from InStyle’s spring Shape Issue:

Her role models were the usual eighties teen-rebel idols—The Smiths, and Siouxsie and the Banshees—as well as the occasional unknowns she spotted on the street. “The same girlfriend and I were in the back of my mom’s car, and we saw this girl, and she had the coolest outfit and we said, ‘Mom, drive up closer.’ And it turned out she was a bag lady. We coveted the outfit of a bag lady.”

The “unknown” was actually a bag lady! Ha!

But at least Applegate’s homeless fashion fixation is a thing of the past. Nicole Richie, on the other hand, is still carrying a torch for the domicile-free look. As quoted in “Nicole Richie’s Domestic Bliss” in Bazaar, June:

She was sanguine about her bad behavior and frank about her friendships, and she confided that she fancied a sort of rocker boy who looks “really pale…really skinny,” adding, “I like people that kind of look homeless.”

So that explains her relationship with Joel Madden! Seriously, Nicole? Don’t pose for a fashion magazine at your father’s spacious Beverly Hills estate while opining how great homeless people look. Don’t they lecture about that in finishing school? (In one of the photos, Lionel Richie is wearing a t-shirt that reads “Hello.” Outstanding!)

But there is one starlet who has never once harbored ambitions of living out of a shopping cart, though she does attempt to impersonate Charlie Chaplin in the baffling accompanying photo shoot. In “Comic Timing” (Allure, June), Jessica Alba bluntly expresses her desire for material success:

What she craved was an acting career and money. Maybe not in that order…“I grew up not having a lot,” Alba says, her face solemn. “I’m really happy to be making money, not depending on a man, and not having to suffer to survive in this business. Struggling is not fun. Been there, done that.”

But dressing like you’re struggling when, in fact, you’re loaded? Fun!

After heroin chic and the current homeless chic, what’s the next imitating-the-less-fortunate craze that celebs will engage in? Hungry chic?

Oh, wait. They’re already doing that, aren’t they?

Allure Explores The Important Topic of Celeb Tattoos

You know how Star magazine prints paparazzi photos of actors and then brands their activities “normal” or “not normal”?  We often have a similar reaction to the famous faces we see in magazines, mentally labeling them as reasonable or, more often, adjectives that aren’t nearly as positive.  A quote from Jenna Jameson in Allure’s “Private Eye,” January, provoked the latter type of reaction.  Take a gander at her response to Jeffrey Slonim’s query, “Any tattoos you’re glad you didn’t get?”

Well, it’s not like there’s anything else about her the grandkids would question! 

See the full feature after the jump.

Allure's Interpretation of Dressing Cheaply Varies from Ours

Know what’s even better than arbitrary fashion rules? Appending heavy-handed assumptions about sexuality to the clothing in question!  Why just scrutinize an outfit when you can cast aspersion on someone’s character, too?  Allure’s “Life of the Party,” December, covers all those bases in the guise of helping us discern what, exactly, we’re supposed to wear to holiday parties with nebulous dress codes.  (Festive casual?  What the hell?) 

Here’s some priceless guidance from stylist Kate Young:

And I love dresses by Kate Moss for TopShop.  They’re really fancy but still fun and slutty—in a good way.

Oh.  Whew.  Well, as long as they’re slutty in a good way… We really, really wish Allure had pestered Young to expound on this point.  The word “slut” has such negative connotations, but Young is saying to be “slutty in a good way.”  Is she telling us to eschew society’s standards?  Is she urging us to embrace our sexuality?  Does she want to jettison such labels altogether?

Who knows?  There’s no evidence Young herself has any clue, as she elucidates her slutty-in-a-good-way aesthetic:

Deep, plunging necklines are OK, as long as the amount of cleavage you’re showing is tasteful.

So a plunge neck is fine if it doesn’t show too much décolletage...which is kind of the point of a low-cut top. And where does the “slutty” part come in again?   We couldn’t tell you, but we could point you to part where it becomes clear that using the term “slutty” was just for shock value.

I don’t like backless for cocktail parties, though.  There’s something too risque about it...

And the appalling part:

...—in a way that low-cut in the front isn’t.  It shows you’re definitely not wearing a bra, and it invites men to walk up and touch you.

Right, because not covering our bodies from head to toe is a direct invitation for men to approach us and touch us!  It’s totally our fault for dressing that way if a man we don’t know feels ENTITLED to paw at us!

Here’s the unspeakably ludicrous part:

You know how a woman in lingerie is sexier than a naked woman?  It's the same sort of thing with this.  A backless dress just means business.

Business, eh?  We’re guessing she doesn’t mean the kind that takes place in boardrooms.  How lovely to imply that women with bare backs sell their bodies for cash!

You know, there’s a lot of talk about reclaiming negative words and repurposing them as emblems of strength.  If Kate Young was trying to do that with the term in question, we’d applaud her efforts.  But throwing out the word “slutty,” stripping it of meaning with the “in a good way” disclaimer, and then using it to propagate outrageously judgmental, outmoded, and flat-out incorrect standards doesn’t do anyone any favors. 

Least of all us—we have a holiday party coming up, and we still have no idea what to wear.

Advertising in Allure: Shirtless Shilling

Spotted in the October issue of Allure: four fragrance ads featuring nearly naked women.  Because everyone knows that wearing perfume means you don’t have to wear a shirt!  (But just in case, better cover up those breasts with whatever object is lying around!  Like that pile of flower petals!)

    

As repugnant (and lazy!) as we find the extraneous use of nudity to sell things, we dislike the Marc Jacobs and Mariah Carey ads even more.  Is the model in the Daisy ad unconscious?  Dead?  Or, you know, just asleep in the grass in her underwear?  Totally normal!  And the Mariah Carey ad—she’s mostly underwater, and her perfume promises an “ethereal presence.”  Thanks, but we’d rather be corporeal than ephemeral.

    

We just read the truly thought-provoking book Can't Buy My Love by Jean Kilbourne, which explores advertising and its insidious effects on women, and we can't stop thinking about it (and, yes, questioning everything we see).  However, there was one ad featuring a topless woman that we wholeheartedly endorse.

Allure's Inadvertent Image Rehab for Britney Spears

A shocker!  Allure breaks from its tradition of super-extra-close-up cover shots—finally—for September’s photo of a bewigged Britney Spears.  Despite the arresting cover photo, the issue contains no actual Britney interview.   Since the tabloid fixture failed to appear for scheduled chats with writer Judith Newman, we didn’t have to brace ourselves for any of Brit’s confessions about her life. Not that we were expecting much in the vein of disarming announcements, anyway:  even the photos here are obviously fake.  Let’s be honest:  the photos in Allure are either the result of significant artifice (her wig) or the result of using photos from 1998 (her waistline).  Seriously, we haven’t seen Brit that slender since…well…earlier this week, when we saw the campaign for her new fragrance.

Anyway, we were truly eager to read Newman’s ruminations on the nature of celebrity, which unfortunately also contained this tidbit that unmasks her secret desires.  Honestly, we think her fantasy life suffers from a serious shortage of imagination if this the best she can do.  She says:

What would I do if I were 25, world famous, unimaginably wealthy, and no one could say no to me?

What?  Do tell!

Well, first, I’d sleep with Dick Cheney.  (It’s my world.  Welcome to it.)

Okay, not everyone drools over Brad Pitt or Matt Damon or whoever the kids are into these days (Zac Efron? meh).  But the Vice President? Even disregarding his politics, we cannot quite visualize the planet Newman apparently inhabits where Dick Cheney even remotely resembles a dreamboat. At least she goes on to justify her crush on the V.P.

I don’t know what it is: the commanding voice, the crooked smile, the possibility that at any moment he might have a heart attack and I would save the lives of thousands…

Wait, she’s turned on by the guy’s heart problems?  Turns out the article helped us gain some perspective about Ms. Spears after all:  before reading this piece, we thought Britney had lousy taste in men. 

Allure: Catherine Zeta-Jones Has More Money Than You Do

Is Allure trying to make us hate Catherine Zeta-Jones? Reading “The Last Showgirl,” August, took our inchoate suspicions about the actress—she comes across as exceptionally high-maintenance, yes?—and magnified them. Naturally, there’s nothing outright derogatory in the profile other than the detail that the Zeta-Jones/Douglas décor includes a bronze statue of Atlas. (Just imagine the kind of apartment that must be.  Yikes!) But there are enough ambiguous moments in the interview that we have to wonder whether writer Brooke Hauser is trying to tell us something. Ah, subtext!

Catherine Zeta-Jones just happens to be good at being a movie star. It’s evident in the langourous way that she moves through a room, as if there were a trail of servants behind her, eager to peel her a grape.

Perhaps it’s because we don’t employ any domestic help, but we aren’t even sure what this means. How does a person behave as if a squadron of servants were tagging along? By barking out random orders? Leaving a trail of clothes on the floor? Even if you did have an actual team of assistants standing by (as CZJ surely does), it would be obnoxious to act as if you expected other people to do your bidding.

There’s a lot to glean from the bottles of Pellegrino, the housekeeper padding silently through the apartment, the shelves dedicated to heavy, leather-bound volumes of the couple’s past scripts, not to mention Michael’s two little gold men. “My Oscar’s in Bermuda”—the Douglases’ main residence—because “Bermuda’s never had one,” she quips.

A lot to glean, indeed! Gracious, those Bermudans must be so grateful that someone so magnificent deigns to keep a gold statuette within their borders! Do they give awards for condescension and self-aggrandizement? Because maybe she could keep those in Bermuda too!

Also, leather-bound scripts? Please. Like the repartee in Ocean’s Twelve was worth immortalizing.

Click-clack past the laundry closet, where she stops to roll her eyes and joke, “I’m constantly in there.”

Oh, another hilarious riposte! We know it’s a joke because ultra-glam movie stars would never stoop to doing their own laundry! How preposterous! They have servants for that! Ha! Hey, Catherine? We aren’t comedy experts or anything, but that remark is only funny to you because—wait for it—you don’t actually have to do your own wash. Outrageous privilege is, like, riotously funny!

And finally:

“I didn’t want to be another girlfriend of Michael Douglas,” she admits. “I remember feeling this immediate attraction and going, What are you going to do: Invest, like, a night or something? I didn’t want to put myself in that situation.” So, she did what any self-respecting woman in her situation would do: She tortured him. “Nine months without a touch or a kiss,” she says, with a light snort. “I’m sure he thought, Something’s not right with this chick. It usually doesn’t take me this long.”

At last, clear instructions for self-respecting women—simply string men along for months on end to make them appreciate you. Playing hard-to-get is the only way to make guys respect you, since you don’t have anything else to offer. Men do love a chase (and, apparently, being chaste)!

Presumably, this article is meant to be positive press (take note, Britney), and maybe CZJ is the kindest, most generous person in the world. We’ll never know her true nature for sure, but this article didn’t exactly have us signing up for membership in the Catherine Zeta-Jones fan club. But what do we know? We eat the peel on our grapes.

Allure Defends Nicole Richie With a Drug Reference

We found this amusing bit in Allure’s “Bottoms Up!” by Rory Evans, July.  Evans mentions gossip blogs, but we are quite sure we’re not reading the same ones.  These two sentences of hers actually made us laugh out loud.

If an actress gets too bony-assed, the paparazzi turn on her and so does public opinion.  (Could anyone imagine blogging smack about Audrey Hepburn the way they do about Nicole Richie?)

Because, you know, there isn’t a single gossip-worthy detail about Nicole Richie other than her weight.  But that surely unintentional reference to “smack”?  Genius!

Shocking Allure Investigation Reveals That Stars Take Drugs

So, maybe we’re more sensitive to it living on the West Coast, but we’ve noticed a string of articles painting California as a strange land.  Continuing the neverending series of stories whose existence seems predicated on the idea  that Los Angeles is indeed very different from New York, Allure’s June issue includes “Hollywood High,” an investigation of the “star party scene.”  Wait, celebrities take drugs? We had no idea!  (And good thing they came west to look into this matter:  famous people in NYC never, ever use!)

Predictably, this barely restrained piece by writer Mary A. Fischer isn’t quite Pulitzer-worthy.  Rather, it’s downright lazy.  The article fails to break any ground whatsoever, attempting to stun us with the following facts that should be patently obvious to anyone over the age of 16 who’s ever watched one measly episode of Access Hollywood:

1. Famous people take drugs!  In nightclubs!  OMG!

2. Celebrities get their drugs gratis in exchange for passing along their dealer’s number to wealthy pals.  You know, like how they get designer clothes.

3. Clubs are catering to drug users, offering more bottled water and energy drinks to prevent the downer effect caused by mixing certain drugs with alcohol.  (Okay, so we learned something new about chemistry, but we aren’t surprised to learn that clubs cater to their clientele’s base desires.  That’s how they make money, after all.)

4. Well-known drug dealers have no trouble getting into nightclubs.

5. Other than the dealers, only invited guests, celebs, and “really hot-looking” people are granted admission to nightspots.

Apparently, they don’t want to distinguish this article too much from the serious journalism that appears in Us Weekly (or, we suppose, potentially invite litigation), so no names are mentioned. Fair enough. But with nary a thinly disguised clue, how are we supposed to discern the true identities of the following individuals mentioned?  Other than assuming these descriptions all refer to Lindsay Lohan and/or Nicole Richie, that is, because we definitely are. 

a young fashion publicist

a beautiful young starlet

a model who, before she cleaned up her act, ran in these circles

one celebrity party girl

a film editor  (We say: no one cares.)

a high-profile celebrity

a well-known celebrity and two of her friends

“Celebrity party girl”?  Come on, Allure, you’re not even trying!

Other than the identity of the people featured in this article, one particular anecdote also captured our imagination:

…on a quiet residential street three blocks from the Sunset Strip, the dealer pulled up in a nondescript car, turned off the lights, and waited.  A black SUV with four people inside parked behind him.

Two adjacent parking spots near Sunset on a Friday night? If only!  Sadly, that’s the most shocking part of this article, except maybe that we read every single word of it.

We Read It So You Don't Have To: Lindsay Lohan Gets Melodramatic in Allure

Some of the utter lunacy in Allure’s Lindsay Lohan profile, May, has already been making its way across the internet, but we only received our subscription copy on Saturday.  And it was totally worth the wait, too, since we received the added bonus of a booklet introducing us to the vendors behind every single one of the beauty lines QVC carries.  Oh, the joys of being a subscriber!

Still, we had no idea how much of a treat we were in for when we arrived at page 280 and saw this:

Coming of Age

From the beginning of her successful career, Lindsay Lohan has aspired to be a modern-day Marilyn Monroe.  Is she starting to resemble her tragic idol?

Sounds like someone’s taking Lindsay just a wee bit too seriously.  Don’t have the stomach to endure the entire wretchedly earnest thing?  Here’s the gist of it:

“I feel like a second parent in the sense that I helped raise my family,” she says of her younger three siblings.  “And I was put between my mother and father a lot.  Well, I would put myself between them to try and keep the peace, and I felt good doing that.  For what it’s worth.”  A rueful shrug.  “Now they’re divorced.”

Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary (like, say, her parents’ divorce), Lindsay nonetheless believes she has the power to keep people secure.

“When my friends have left me—I’ve just seen everything collapse,” she says.  “They’re not safe without me.”

Which we think explains why her father’s in prison!  Either she really is incredibly powerful, or she’s dumb enough to make threats to her pals via a reporter.

On to the topic du jour:

“It’s so weird that I went to rehab,” she says.  “I always said I would die before I went to rehab.”

Well, yes, that’s typically how these things work.  And we thought her mother had no sense of irony!

“I say [I idolize] Marilyn Monroe, because if I were blonde, that’s who I’d want to be like,” she demurs…“I use everything she’s gone through when I’m upset.  That’s what I take from her.”

Because, you know, it all worked out so well for Marilyn. 

“I never passed out in my life!  I never vomited from having drinks.  Like in public.  I would never do that.  Well—” she amends, “a few times.  Well, everyone does in high school.  I’m not saying everyone.”

Whoa, Lindsay is so out of touch, so used to life in the spotlight, that the distinction between vomiting in public from drinking too much and vomiting in private from the same cause is actually meaningful.  Why would she even bother to deny drinking to excess when, hello, she discusses going to rehab in this same interview?  (And, if we can be sincere for a microsecond, how sad is this?)

But writer Judy Bachrach saved the best for almost last, creating a chilling culmination of this entire overwrought article.

“It’s like when you’re doing a movie, and it ends.  Then you don’t see the other people for so long.”  Lohan says that she weeps when the filming stops, every time.  For her, it’s like losing family members.  Yet again.

And for us, this straining-for-drama story is another sliver of our lives lost to Allure.  Yet again.