Glossed Over

Vogue Liveblog 2012: The Biggest Issue Yet

Hello! Welcome to the sixth annual Vogue liveblog.  My name is Wendy, and I’ll be your increasingly unhinged guide today as I take you through all 916 pages of the largest-ever September issue. 

The rules: I bought this magazine yesterday. I have not opened it. I have not read anything about the contents of this issue, except for one Yahoo! news story about this being the largest issue ever. Entries will appear in chronological order--just refresh to see the new posts.

If for some reason you have a job or a family or other obligations that prevent you from obsessively reloading this page all day, no worries! Check @glossedover on Twitter for occasional updates. I’ll be using the hashtag #vogueliveblog, and I’d love for you to use it too. You know. If you want. No pressure. Your hair looks great.

All right, enough preamble. Shall we?

Allure's Olympic Coverage: Beach Volleyball and Butts

Tonight, Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh will compete for their third consecutive gold medal in beach volleyball. (Update: they won!) Back in the July issue of Allure, they were profiled in a story called "Golden Girls," which, by the way, is a title so played out it should be banned. Especially when, in the case of this article, the text is less about gold medals and more about, well, ass.

And not just the lingering shots of barely clad butts that you've come to expect from the quality coverage of beach volleyball available to us here in the USA. (Thanks, NBC!) No, Allure manages, somehow, to take the media's obsession with beach volleyball players' bodies to Olympian heights.  

The article opens on a Southern California beach. May-Treanor and Walsh, wearing bathing suits (of course), are walking on the beach to their practice spot. Along the way, they capture the attention of a man playing a casual game of volleyball. Imagine if you were playing volleyball in the sand, and along come the world's foremost players. What would you think?

Pretty much the exact opposite of this guy, I'm guessing. Also, unlike this chump, you'd probably be able to form complete sentences.

His reaction, so insightful it apparently demanded to be immortalized in print:

"Ass, ass, ass, ass, ass," he mumbled to his teammates. As if on cue, a small crowd of tourists, surfers, lifeguards...squinted into the blazing sun to watch the women walk by.

"Ass, ass, ass, ass," the man repeated, a little louder this time. "That's some five-star ass."

Was his comment offensive? Sure. Objectifying? Of course. But accurate? ...Absolutely.

Was his comment disgusting? Sure. Would it be street harassment if it had occurred there instead of on the beach? Of course. But Allure still thought it necessary to include? Absolutely! And in case you didn't get exactly what this guy was carrying on about, because "ass, ass, ass" is really quite complex, Allure helpfully included this giant picture of--you guessed it!--what appears to be Walsh's ass.

There's not actually a caption explaining whose ass it is, at least not in the Kindle edition, so I deduced based on the bikini. Congratulations, Allure! You've just won the gold medal in the dehumanizing the subjects of your article! 

Next, the article details the women's accomplishments, but veers almost immediately into something far more challenging: bikini line hair removal! Because what's really important isn't their world championships, it's their pubic hair. Then:

Therein lies a dichotomy: Yes, they are extremely serious athletes [apparently it's necessary to remind the reader of this, since the author has done little to relay this key point], but there is no getting around the fact that they're also "girls running around in bikinis," as Walsh puts it.

Yes, hard to get around that, when a national magazine opens its profile with a story specifically highlighting that. 

While it's a relief to know that these women have hang-ups about their bodies...

It's not a relief. It's terrible. I know this line is supposed to make Walsh and May-Treanor seem relatable, but it's depressing as hell. If I ever manage to reconfigure my DNA so that I too can be six feet tall and totally ripped, I will walk around naked. Constantly. In public. THERE SHALL BE NO HANGUPS. 

Off the beach, the women are plenty girlish.

Oh good! I wouldn't want their lives as professional athletes to somehow diminish a total stranger's arbitrary assessment of how much they resemble a child! 

You get the idea. In the every-four-years glut of women's mag articles about athletes, "Golden Girls" fits right in. And while it's kind of annoying to see athletes reduced to such trifles when I'd rather know, say, how they stay focused, the beauty articles make some sense. I mean, I go swimming once a week and my hair is like steel wool for days after--so, sure, I would like to know what conditioner Natalie Coughlin uses.

But, other than an aside about oily sunscreens affecting the volleyball, Allure's article never quite achieves that winning (sorry) combination of unique athletic perspective and fun beauty chat. The piece talks about how the two look great in bikinis, but not how to select a perfectly fitting one. It mentions how well sand exfoliates, but not how to moisturize after. And, of course, there is the ass picture. 

At one point in the story, Walsh says, "I can honestly say I haven't felt objectified one day in my life." I hope, after Allure's article, she still feels that way.

Lowest Common Denominator: Glamour, July

3: Number of consecutive Glamour covers featuring blonde reality stars: Lauren Conrad, Carrie Underwood, and now Julianne Hough, who miraculously survived the glitter factory explosion depicted on the cover. 

Less than zero: Likelihood that I will ever use Glamour's Word of the Month, "frizzle," because using it would take more explanation than simply saying "There's just enough precipitation to make my hair frizz" and it'd require the admission that I take Glamour's suggestions seriously.

27: Page on which Avengers star Cobie Smulders propagates some gender-essentialist bullshit, saying you talk about your period and "where we are in life" with women, and talk about movies with men. Movies like, oh, Avengers? Which had a 40 percent female audience?

4: Nearly naked aspiring Olympic swimmers pictured in this issue. Do what you will with that information.

Amounts so vast even Neil deGrasse Tyson couldn't quantify them: How much I hate the skirt-over-dress look that Glamour incessantly includes in "The Month in Outfits." Isn't the whole point of a dress that you don't need to wear more clothes with it?

Not a single one: Fucks given about Taylor Tomasi Hill at Glamour HQ, apparently. They actually wrote "Google her" in the subhead for "‘What Inspires Me,' by Taylor Tomasi Hill." Seriously? You can't just tell me why you put her in the magazine?

0.2 percent: Likelihood that any tweet tagged with the Glamour-invented hashtag "#prettygirlproblems" is, in fact, a problem. Young women of America, please don't lie awake nights because you're a "brow newbie."

SPECIAL COMMENTARY ON GLAMOUR'S TOPIC OF THE MONTH, ORAL SEX

27: Percent of men surveyed by Glamour who "would rather get a blow job tonight than a raise at work."

27: Percent of men surveyed by Glamour who need to learn to play the long game.

20: Age of a man quoted as saying "I know a lot of guys who are pretty proud of going down on a woman."

Infinite: My joy that I will never again have to date 20-year-old men. #smugmarried

END SPECIAL COMMENTARY ON GLAMOUR'S TOPIC OF THE MONTH, ORAL SEX

Zero, no wait, one: Words I can bring myself to write about the profile of Julianne Hough. And the word is dullsville. I suspect the interview was actually conducted with Hough's publicist.

102: Page on which Glamour declares "Yep, He [Channing Tatum] Was a Stripper"

115, or equivalent to a sandblaster: Approximate decibel level at which I yelled, YES I KNOW I DON'T LIVE IN A CAVE I'VE READ THAT 327 TIMES IN THE LAST THREE WEEKS. 

+100: Serious, sincere bonus points to Glamour for using a real-sized woman in "Feel-Good Allover Beauty" and not even once patting themselves on the back for being so inclusive. More like this, please.

7th: Item in a list of "Eleven Things You Can Only Get Away With in Summer" wherein Glamour advises "Shimmer. Everywhere." Well, that explains the cover.

The Fifth Annual September Vogue Liveblog

Good morning! Welcome to the fifth annual liveblog of the September issue of Vogue. Five years! 

The rules: I have not opened this issue, nor have I read any blog posts/articles/embittered rants about its content. I will, however, admit to watching Racked try to smash snack foods with this sucker. It's heavy! The liveblog goes in chronological order; refresh the page to see the latest updates.

Oh, and one more thing. As I mentioned in the video, I will be tweeting during the day using the hashtag #vogueliveblog, and I would love for you to use that hashtag too! As a small token of my gratitude for all of you out there reading along with me, I'll be giving The September Issue on DVD to three randomly selected people who tweet a link to this site and the hashtag between 10 a.m. today and 5 p.m. Eastern on Friday. (This is not a sponsored giveaway, just me spending my own money to send three lucky people a movie. US and Canada only, sorry.) Remember, your tweet must include both a link--you can use http://bit.ly/vogueliveblog11--and the hashtag #vogueliveblog to be eligible to win.  [Contest now closed, winners declared.] Thanks for being here!

Now let's get going.

Lowest Common Denominator: Lucky, September

981: According to the cover, the number of “ways to look amazing this season”

Gazillions: Approximate number of words in this issue. For better or worse (and, in the case of the never-ending article about drunk shopping, it’s definitely worse), there is now actual text in this magazine.

24: Items retailing for less than $50 featured in “Classic Pieces for Every Day”

116: Page on which Jessica Alba’s “Post-Baby Shape-Up Plan” appears, almost entirely devoid of context. I know Lucky is new to this whole writing-complete-sentences-and-forming-paragraphs thing, but they couldn’t follow up on Alba’s statement that she drinks a lot of water because she’s “starving”?

$60: As listed in “City Guide,” the price of a “Carrie Bradshaw-style pink tutu” sold by a store in Los Angeles, like a “Carrie Bradshaw-style” anything is a good thing.

$375: Price of a satchel that is, according to “How To: Wear Color,” the “easiest way to add a shot of color.” 

Zero: Explanation of how “easy” it is to spend $375 on a neon bag.

1, apparently: Words left out of the headline “Dress Like a French Girl. No, Really, a Real French Girl.” That word? “Wealthy,” unless it’s being French that somehow enables one to purchase a $550 dress and an $860 jacket. In which case, vive la France!

$250: Price of a cat-ear hood that Lucky suggests wearing “with a dose of irony, for the downtown hipster.” Behold the amazingly awkward exchange that ensued when I tweeted @LuckyMagazine about this ridiculous headgear! Veronica, aka @duncandesign, joined in to keep the conversation on track.

3: “Stylish New Yorkers” plucked from “the sidewalks of Soho” to model fall fashions in “Style on the Street.”

100: Percent of those random New Yorkers who are conventionally slim and pretty! Surprise!

Not 2: According to Jean Godfrey-June, the number of people permitted in the dressing rooms at Gilly & Hicks, Abercrombie & Fitch’s lingerie store. She says:

(You can’t both go in [the dressing room]; the surroundings are so...provocative...that liaisons are rumored to have occurred in the dressing rooms, hence, a ban.)

Infinitely: How weird it is that Godfrey-June would mention this, considering that in the story she’s shopping with her daughter.

2: Cover lines on the issue of Lucky Kids stuck inside the back cover that are uncomfortably reminiscent of the controversy over 10-year-old model Thylane Blondeau: “Dresses So Pretty You’ll Wish They Came in Your Size” and “I Want My Kid’s Hair Color!” (Related reading: this article about fashion brands using child models to normalize eating disorders.)

0: Interest I had in pulling Lucky Kids out of the magazine--until I needed something to shield my laptop with during a sudden downpour. 

InStyle Makeover: Rita Hayworth's Ethnic Makeover Was "Worth It"

When I meet someone new and tell them about this blog, the responses I get usually fall into two categories. Most often I hear, “Oh! Totally! I stopped reading those magazines years ago.” And sometimes I get, “Well...what kinds of things do you write about, exactly?”

From now on, when someone asks the latter, I’m just going to hand them “The Hollywood Hot Machine” from InStyle Makeover’s September issue. This single page manages to include pretty much everything that’s wrong with women’s magazines: obsession with the male gaze, extreme beauty regimens, impossibly strict diets, and a dash of shocking ignorance. Handy!

The article features six actresses who’ve made major adjustments to their appearances to launch their showbiz careers. We aren’t talking about going from a side part to a middle part here, you know? If the fact that these women had to dramatically change their hair, faces, bodies and even their names--or at least felt they had to--isn’t maddening enough for you, maybe you’ll hate the breezy tone InStyle uses to describe their transformations. I sure did!

For instance, the article says Joan Crawford (née Lucille LeSueur) used “rigorous diet and exercise” to become “sleek.”

Reportedly, she even chewed gum in an attempt to sharpen her jawline.

Apparently no celebrity plastic surgeons were available to comment on the merits of Orbit as a cosmetic technique. Try it at home, readers!

The article goes on to mention haircuts and wardrobe changes for Marilyn Monroe and Diana Ross, and says of Jane Fonda:

Fonda’s first husband, Roger Vadim, directed her schoolgirl-to-sex-kitten makeover. He’d done the same for previous wife Brigitte Bardot.

And a man habitually directing his wives into “sex kitten” makeovers isn’t creepy or predatory at all!

Oh, and what about Jennifer Aniston?

Yoga, hairstylist Chris McMillan, and a salad for lunch almost every day for 10 years helped Aniston morph into this honey-dipped goddess.

So we again have a man to thank. And of course there’s that salad-a-day for a decade thing. Is that a healthy diet, a reasonable approach to eating, or just something Aniston’s publicist made up? Who cares? The real message here is that she’s whippet-thin, as anyone who’s seen her wearing scanty underthings in Horrible Bosses can tell you. 

But I’ve reserved the bulk of my outrage for the Rita Hayworth entry, which reads:

Painful but worth it: In two years, Margarita Cansino raised her hairline almost an inch with electrolysis. And when she went red, a star was born.

“Painful but worth it”? WHAT THE HELL. Do InStyle’s offices not have access to Wikipedia? I have to assume that’s the case, because obviously no one at the magazine knows why Hayworth had that electrolysis: at the behest of Columbia Pictures, to make her appearance less Hispanic and therefore more marketable. That’s also why she dyed her hair red and bleached her skin. 

(Incidentally, that second link has a context-sensitive ad for a skin-lightening treatment that reads “InStyle Award Winner!” Wow.) 

Celebrities change their appearances for all kinds of reasons, but praising a racially motivated, excrutiatingly painful cosmetic procedure as “worth it” is, at best, insensitive. (And at worst? I really don’t want to break out the “r” word.) Did Hayworth look better than Cansino did? That’s subjective. But there are some ugly, ugly implications attached to glorifying a makeover designed to hide Hayworth’s heritage. I mean, what’s the reader takeaway supposed to be here? That everyone looks better as a white person? That the agony Hayworth must have gone through was “worth it” to not look Hispanic?

This is tricky territory, and InStyle could have provided context or sidestepped those implications entirely. But they didn’t, and that’s the problem. Articles like this propagate the idea that beauty is pain--and that beauty is determined by men, and it requires expensive, painful treatments, and it demands extreme, restrictive diets, and that only certain kinds of women (namely thin white women) are beautiful. Perhaps expecting InStyle Makeover to acknowledge as much is ridiculous. 

Still, it’s been more than 80 years since the picture of Lucille LeSueur on this page was taken. Eighty years after LeSueur tried to reshape her face by chewing gum, and Jennifer Aniston eats arugula every day. Eighty years. That’s a long time for so little to have changed.

People StyleWatch! Is! Really! Excited!: Five Fast Facts About the World’s Most Enthusiastic Magazine

1. They love exclamation points. They loooooove them. The first time I bought PSW, I was in a terrible funk. I flipped through an issue at the newsstand and saw the exclamation points, the pink arrows, and the pages almost entirely devoid of text, and I was like, “How cheerful!” Except that when everything concludes with an exclamation point--there are ten on the cover of the June issue alone, four in a tiny blurb about a juice drink--it comes off less like genuine enthusiasm and more just plain manic. (Yeah, yeah, I use a lot of exclamation points, too, but I use them sarcastically. Glass houses, etc.)

2. They also love irrelevant actors. This issue is packed with the likes of Camilla Alves, Emmy Rossum, and Rachel Bilson. And they! are! excited! about Camilla Belle, who I’m convinced is a publicist’s fabrication and not an actual human being. Has anyone ever seen her in a movie? Doesn’t matter, because PSW has devoted an entire page to her clothes and is looking forward to her upcoming roles in Breakaway and Zebras. Both of which are real movies, I’m sure.

3. They think they have moneybags readers. And perhaps they do. But foolishly, I’d expected PSW to be a low-end counterpart to Lucky. What was I thinking? There’s no advertiser payola in that! While the magazine does feature a decent mix of affordable styles (“Under $25!”), there are also the typical tone-deaf suggestions like “Celebs Love a Deal.” I’ll grant them Kirsten Dunst’s $50 dress from Express, but I refuse to budge on Vanessa Hudgens’ $71 scarf. Come on! It’s a scarf. Did kittens weave the scarf from their own freshly shed fur? No? Then no deal.

4. They run the worst celebrity ads ever. Admittedly, I’m behind on my reading what with moving across the country and job-hunting and all, so perhaps these ads (“celebrity mom Brooke Burke” for Suave, Patricia Field for U by Kotex) are in all the mags. But I want to discuss this Jessica Szohr ad for Dove antiperspirant: it’s THREE PAGES of her in the most awkward, armpit-revealing poses ever committed to print. In addition to pictures so bad they’re not even comical, the ad includes obviously fabricated quotes about the preposterous outfits she’s modeling. For instance:

My hip fedora tips this knit tank bohemian.

Did you have to read that sentence three times before you figured out which word was supposed to be the verb? Me too! Also:

Rocking sleeveless styles makes me feel powerful and feminine.

Uh, it’s a sleeveless top. Where does the power come from? Your hairless underarms? I am so confused by this conflation of armpits with, you know, ACTUAL EMPOWERMENT. I could go on, but I’ll just say this: Dove is merely a deodorant. It’s not a substance that magically confers equality when you apply it. Feminism will not emanate from your powder-scented armpits. Okay?

5. They employ hilariously meaningless statements about fashion. It’s the Lucky syndrome: when you have to describe everything, you’re backed into some truly absurd statements. And I know whereof I speak: in a former job, I had to describe 75 different pieces of lingerie every month, without using the word “sexy.” Try it at home some time. You’ll want to beat your head against a wall, or make friends with a thesaurus, or both!

About a pair of J. Crew espadrilles:

They’re so easy to slip on and off!

Good, because putting on and removing shoes is usually so challenging!

About a JC Penney elephant-pendant necklace:

Adds a unique, global touch!

Because nothing says you’re independent and cultured like wearing a $10 necklace from a national department store chain.

And on Taylor Swift’s tunic:

A drapey top worn off the shoulder adds a flirty, offhand touch.

Offhand? Is it supposed to look like you didn’t try at all? Fashion, you confuse me.

So that’s the June issue People StyleWatch, in approximately the same amount of words that actually appear in the magazine. I’ll save you the trouble of counting: I used twelve exclamation points in this post, not counting the title, and only three of those appeared in quotes from the magazine. Use the comments to castigate me as you see fit.

Link-Packed Filler Post, Plus a Brief Discussion of Cosmopolitan's Hayley Williams Profile

Hi! So I’m a little frantic right now. I’m moving out of my apartment on Saturday, I’m hyper-caffeinated to work on a writing project with a looming deadline, I’m getting on one-way flight to New York on Wednesday, and I may or may not have spent all afternoon reading my high-school journals. (I’m moving! I have to go through my stuff!)

All of which should suffice as an overdramatic explanation for why posting will be slow around here for another week or two. 

I did manage to read the most recent issue of Cosmopolitan, which featured Hayley Williams of Paramore. 

Let’s discuss that Cosmo article, shall we? In particular, the passage about how William’s bandmates (male, of course) used to pull up her pants and write “Shave Me” on her legs. Which is indescribably awful, but you wouldn’t get that from Cosmo’s retelling, which relates this oh-so-charming anecdote as part of a “Hayley Williams becomes a woman” narrative, instead of in a “Who the hell are these guys to try to physically enforce beauty standards on a professional colleague?” way. 

The punchline, if you can call it that, is that Williams now has a tattoo of a razor on her leg “as a little reminder.” And if I have to explain how many millions of kinds of twisted that is, well, are you sure you’re reading the right blog?

So probably nothing I read in the next, like, fifty years is likely to top that, but here are some good things I’ve read in the last week. Hopefully, I’ll regain my normal thought processes once I arrive in New York on the 27th. 

• Anna Wintour wore hideous clothes in the 90s. Here’s proof.
  
  
• “‘Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they’ll grow up perverted’”: Smithsonian magazine on the rise of gender-oriented colors.
  
  
• Cosmo embraces kink with its typical brio (along with a dose of slut-shaming and terrible advice). The Evil Slut Clique breaks it down.
  
  
• It’s that time of year! Allure has once again convinced a handful of vaguely famous women to pose nude in the interest of self-promotion -acceptance. Popsugar has the pics.
  
  
• The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority responds to accusations that a Miu Miu ad model was unhealthily thin, determining that her gaunt appearance was actually due to makeup and lighting.
  
  
• Comma ‘N Sentence has a lovely reflection on the first bare-legged days of spring.
  
  
• The Hairpin’s take on Marie Claire’s man blogger made me LOL. (And, BTW, their Friday Bargain Bin posts are pretty much my favorite thing on the internet right now.)
  
  
• And finally, my Twitter, where I share articles like this and other important things, like which painfully outdated song I’m currently obsessing over. 

Lowest Common Denominator: Glamour, May

26, 22, 24: Ages of the actresses appearing on Glamour’s multiple May covers (Freida Pinto, Emma Stone, and Ashley Greene, respectively)

39, 40: Ages of Amy Poehler, who’s profiled on page 214, and Tina Fey, whose book is all-too-briefly excerpted on page 72

8: Women in swimsuits depicted on page 32 as the epitome of “total confidence we all envy”

50: Percent of those women who are professional actors or athletes

$45: Price of a dress from Express suggested for its similarity to the D&G dress Stone wore on her cover

$1,395: Price of Stone’s actual cover dress

2: Letters published complaining that size 12-14 model Robyn Lawley, whose photo accompanied March’s “97% of Women Will Be Cruel to Their Bodies Today,” was too “perfect”

Zip: Amount of acknowledgement from Glamour about the same readers’ pleas to include all shapes and sizes in their photos (though they did interview Lawley about the readers’ criticism, as if that’s Lawley’s fault)

98: Page on which Glamour recommends a $132 t-shirt screenprinted with a cat’s face 

5: Tricks cited in “What Helps Reese [Witherspoon] Look Like Reese”

0: Mentions of genetics in “What Helps Reese Look Like Reese”

10: Items writer Josh Aiello’s girlfriend carries in her purse, according to “Inside Her Bag: The Final Frontier”

8: Number of times Aiello busts out a girls-are-so-strange stereotype in his commentary. Women carry a lot of stuff! How do they find things in their bags? “I have hands. Do they need cream?” he asks about a tube of L’Occitane lotion. The aneursym-inducing conundrum of differentiating between lip balm and lipstick, he says, “boggles the male mind.” Sheesh.

$20: The “highly affordable” fee for a lap dance, according to “What’s Up with the Stripper Thing?”

None: Despite the claim on the cover and the NSFW tag on the article, actual photos of naked man parts in “The Ultimate Guide to His Man Parts” (There are two models with bare buttocks, but that’s hardly what Glamour’s trying to imply by boasting “with pictures!” on the cover.)

2: Couples who got engaged after the woman cooked “Engagement Chicken,” according to “7 Dishes to Get You Everything You Want in Life”

Thousands: Approximate number of Google users searching for the term “engagement chicken” who've landed on this blog since I first posted about it in 2006. Is my shameless ploy for Google traffic better or worse than believing that a chicken dish can compel a man to propose? You decide!

Magazine Masochism: Reading Lucky's May Issue

When I was sixteen, I went with two friends to see Merchant-Ivory’s The Remains of the Day. It was a poor choice for three teenagers shit-faced on Sour Patch Kids: much of the subtle period drama was lost on us. We sat in stunned silence until the end, when one of my friends turned to me in the dark and blurted, “WHAT WAS THAT?” 

That’s how I felt reading the May edition of Lucky. Admittedly, this most crass of magazines is nothing like the nuanced film. But my reaction to this issue was the same as my friend’s to the movie.

Everything about this issue just seemed off. I mean, exclamations like “best doorknob accessory ever!” (page 132) technically make sense, even if decorating doorknobs, let alone determining what sort of overpriced trinket could be crowned the best doorknob ornament ever, never occurred to me. Am I supposed to care about this stuff?

And sure, there’s at least one office on the planet where the denim blazer and yellow micro-shorts pictured in “Four Girls, One Lace Top,” deemed “perfect for work” by accessories designer Meghan Asha, are actually appropriate. That workplace is probably Lucky HQ, but it still counts, right?

But my most profound confusion came from the cover. Check out the lower right-hand corner: this image, from the Lucky Facebook page, says “Dress for Curves: Ginnifer Goodwin shares her styling know-how.” My newsstand copy says:

How to Dress for Curves by Ginnifer Goodwin

OH COME ON. Even allowing that “curvy” is a completely meaningless word, how on earth is Ginnifer Goodwin an expert on this?

Let’s go to the text! From “Southern Comfort,” page 58:

Goodwin’s comfort with her curves [this is where I paused to inspect the three photos of Goodwin on page 66 all Sherlock Holmes-like, seeking evidence of said curves] is largely due to her stylist, Penny Lovell, who introduced the star to tailoring. “I’m three different sizes,” says Goodwin, gesturing to her tiny waist, narrow shoulders and what she calls her “womanly” hips. “I buy things that are big and tailor them down.”

Where do I even begin?

First: Goodwin came to terms with her body “due to her stylist”? How fortunate for her! How unfortunate for the rest of us!

Secondly: being three different sizes doesn’t necessarily mean you’re curvy. It means you’re not a dressmaker’s mannequin. This is not an affliction limited to one particular body type, as anyone who’s tried on a Go International dress at Target well knows.

Next: Your hips are “womanly” because you’re a woman. They’re supposed to be that way.

Finally: Buying clothes to fit the largest part of your body and tailoring them down? This is neither revelatory advice (especially not to anyone who’s seen a single episode of What Not to Wear), nor is it exactly dressing to flatter your body. Also, it’s an utterly unhelpful tip if you’re a discount shopper. If I have to spend an additional $40 to tailor a pair of Gap pants, then I probably can’t afford them.

Now that her clothes fit better, Goodwin is braver about fashion… “Things look better when I embrace my body.”

Aw, what a lovely sentiment! Not so lovely? After recommending a Memphis specialty chocolate store, Goodwin says this:

“If I lived here, I’d be an elephant!”

Yeah, I’m having a little trouble reconciling all the curve-loving euphoria in the previous paragraphs with dehumanizing garbage like this. Eating chocolate—even eating chocolate every day—might make you heavier. It will not make you an elephant. People who weigh more than Ginnifer Goodwin are not the world’s largest land mammals.

The Goodwin article comes to an all-too-merciful end shortly thereafter, but I could go on for hours about this issue. There are the reader quotes that sound exactly like everything else in the magazine. There’s the “smoky-wood-floor” scent Jean Godfrey June describes. There’s the fact that a gainfully employed copyeditor considers “retro-ifies” a valid word, because it appears on page 112. And there’s my growing suspicion that only people with tons of money and zero taste could enjoy this magazine.

By the time I reached the final page, I was cranky, exhausted by the lengthy strings of hyphenated descriptors, and just plain numb. Lucky, please explain yourself: WHAT WAS THAT?