Glossed Over

Fashion Mini: New Name, Same Subpar Content

When we bought the Fashion Mini (previously the Daily Mini) at our favorite newsstand yesterday, we were rather disappointed in its lack of heft.  88 pages?  The average issue of InStyle has more than 88 pages in perfume ads alone! But once we sat down to read it, we were relieved that the magazine is so short.  This thing is like MySpace (tons of candids, super self-conscious, wretched design) without video clips.  The Fashion Mini is flat out annoying, and not only because they use the word “chiceratti”—though that certainly is a factor.  

Normally, when we read a magazine, we make a list of things that stand out to us, so we can write about them later.  Sometimes these lists have just one or two items.  And sometimes…well, here’s our list from a cursory read of the May issue (and we’re not even going to talk about the aggressively hideous cover in an attempt to block it from our memory):

1.  The magazine frequently uses a design element that is supposed to replicate the effect of a torn page.  (See the left side of the cover.)  Which would make total sense if, you know, we ever deliberately ripped the corners and the middles of every other page of an issue.

2.  The magazine is liberally sprinkled with the outdated suffix “-ette,” as in “chicette” and “Voguette.”  Is this 1986?

3. Ten pages—more than a tenth of the total magazine—is devoted to a feature on the Hamptons.  Sadly, this may have been the least troublesome part of the issue, if only because a good chunk of it is comprised of actual facts. 

4.  The magazine is woefully addicted to extraneous capitalization and punctuation, as in this example from page 31. 

Are YOU ready for Summer?

The Hamptons!

The Diet!

The Jet-Setting!

The Aggravation of Reading About People With Summer Homes!

5. The spread pushing some garment called the Skimi, which doesn’t even appear to cover the model’s buttocks, and yet can allegedly be worn WITHOUT PANTS TO GO DANCING.  Oh, and the model?  Not a model at all.  She’s the “first-ever Miss Mini,” Olivia Palermo, recently of the Socialite Rank scandal.

6.  Miss Mini.

7. Or what about this quote from Tom Ford?

I can’t be in a store during opening hours anymore because people want me to sign things and take pictures with them with their cell phones.

You’d think that he’d have the grace to not complain about that, considering that the people who’d want to take a picture with him are probably the ones reading this magazine.

8. And what about the quiz about the magazine’s contents on the final page, introduced with this phrase:

Because testing you is loving you.

This magazine is testing us, all right.  But we are definitely not feeling the love.

Daily Mini Is Mad About Mercury (Yes, the Planet)

Oh, Daily Mini, how we’ve missed you!  Especially because no other magazine combines such breathless idolatry of magazine editors with a healthy dose of what can only be described as nonsense.  Like this example from “The Fix” in the April issue:

Mercury went retrograde February 14-March 8.  Did you feel the pain?

Now, we don’t put much stock in astrology, so we were initially skeptical.  But as we read, we were nearly convinced by the Mini.  After all, what else but the planets themselves could have caused a tragedy of such massive (and obviously irreparable) proportions?

On February 18, passengers on Delta Flight 84 going from New York to Milan for Fashion Week were struck by Mercury mischief.  They sat on the chilly runway for more than 2 1⁄2 hours, then deplaned, switched gates, and waited another 90 minutes.

A runway icing over in February in the northeastern United States?  Why, that’s practically unheard of!  It couldn’t simply be normal weather conditions causing these kinds of problems.  Nope, it must be the motion of another planet entirely creating such wretched misfortune! 

Like delaying this particular flight wasn’t horrific enough, those rascally planets actually caused a model to miss some of her scheduled runway struts.  The nerve!

Rachel Alexander clutched her Chanel bag, crying because she was going to miss the next morning's shows.

Sniff!  We may need a Kleenex ourselves to get through the rest of this page.  The gall of Mercury to interfere with something as absolutely crucial as fashion!  Hal Rubenstein from InStyle and Kusum Lynn from Jane and a whole bunch of other people we’ve never heard of eventually landed in Italy a whopping six hours late.  Can you imagine the sheer volume of vital fashion they missed in that precious time?  Horrors!  Their careers are done for!

No?  They’re all still employed?  Nothing negative came of those six extra hours stuck stateside?

Sheesh.  Even more impressive than Mercury’s supposed powers is the Mini’s ability to blow a commonplace event completely out of proportion.  But don’t tell the folks at the Mini we said that; they’ll probably just blame it on our Scorpio personality.

Daily Mini: Almost As Solipsistic As MySpace

You know how sometimes you meet someone, and you’re not sure you like him or her too much, but you go home and pull up that person’s MySpace page anyway?

And the person you just met is friends with people who look sort of familiar to you, and you’re fairly sure one of them might eventually have something interesting to say if they ever bother to write more than one cryptic sentence at a time. 

So you keep reading, and you keep studying the photos, trying to place these vaguely recognizable faces.  But everyone’s staring rather self-consciously at the camera and all the photos are cropped at odd angles, so you can’t really be 100% certain what these people actually look like, although they seem to be the sort of people you would never in a million years get along with. 

Before long, you realize they’re all talking about people you’ll never meet and places you’ll never go, and, worse, that they’re discussing these small matters as if they’re of earth-shattering importance (though, you soon realize, nothing else is important to these people).

Still, you keep reading in the hopes one of these potentially intriguing people will stop writing “IAWTC” and actually say something.  (Also, you’re kind of bored.)  And finally—at last!—someone does spit out something both refreshingly candid and heartbreakingly stupid, and suddenly, you’re hooked all over again.

That’s exactly the experience we had reading the December Daily Mini. 

And it was Lindsay Lohan in “Where You Go…” who drew us back into the magazine’s clutches:

I am definitely going somewhere fun for Christmas, and I would tell you, ’cause I’m really excited about it, but if I tell you and you print it, all the paparazzi will follow me.  And then it’s not a vacation, it’s hide-and-seek.

Well, that’s one thing in favor of the Daily Mini:  We enjoyed reading that Lohan quote more than we enjoy waiting for a parade of glittering unicorns to load on a MySpace page.

Daily Mini: Bulimia The Best New Accessory for Winter

From the Daily Mini’s “How You Indulge…and De-bulge,” December, comes a suggestion that confirms our worst suspicions about the fashion industry’s influence on body image:

The only way to stay thin is to have some sort of functioning eating disorder. I’m exercise-bulimic. As a short person, I’m terrified of becoming squat.

—Simon Doonan, Barneys New York

Leave it to the retail guy to spin what was the provenance of the rich and famous into a holiday must-have for the whole world.  It wasn’t enough for every teenage girl to get a Vuitton bag—now they get bulimia, too.  Is nothing sacred and exclusive to the fashion industry elite?

Daily Mini: Style Icon, Yes; Role Model, Not So Much

From the Daily Mini’s “The 50 Most Stylish,” November:

Kate Moss, model/muse

What can be said about the supermodel’s status as a style icon that isn’t apparent from her legions of copycats? She’s now designing for Topshop, which should make it easier to emulate her.

Oh, please, wearing a sweater designed by Kate Moss isn’t truly  “emulating”  her—it isn’t as if she’ll be wearing those clothes. Besides, a genuine, whole-hearted attempt to be like Kate would require being impregnated by a drug-addled musician, and we’re pretty sure—though by no means certain—you can’t get that at Topshop.