Glossed Over

The Headache-Producing Hermeticism of Elle's Editor's Letter

Nicole Kidman’s on the cover of November’s Elle gripping her head like she’s got a vicious migraine, and after reading this month’s “Editor’s Letter,” I know just how she feels.

Even the most hermetic of us (and if you’re reading Elle, I seriously doubt you qualify)…

Why, yes! Because I read Elle, I am far from insulated! I’m exposed to all sorts of points of view, most of which involve clothes I can’t afford, privileges I will never have access to, and lives I don’t care to lead. But whatever, my horizons are broad!

Oh, the irony. The rest of Roberta Myers’ missive explains precisely how hermetic the magazine’s viewpoint is.

But if you take away the actors and celebrities—and the film characters they play so memorably—it’s really hard to point to more than a handful of female public figures whose stories are well enough known to us that they present as archetypes to emulate.

Indeed! There must be a shortage of adulation-worthy women! That’s why the Olsen twins appear in every issue, right?

There’s Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi (quick: name one thing you know about her personal life), and Michelle Obama, and Cindy McCain, I guess. Sarah Palin??

Is Nancy Pelosi’s personal life critical to her “archetype”? Since she’s the Speaker of the House and not a reality show star, I think not.

Which is to say that the narratives about women (and sadly, for women—quick: try to name one female military figure) belong to the imagemakers and movie stars.

Because there are more prominent female movie stars than military figures, the latter aren’t worth writing about? If Elle thinks its readers can’t name women in the service (and I’d bet most of us can), isn’t that even more reason to cover the many, many women who’ve enlisted in the Armed Forces?

Because let’s face it, power in Hollywood reaches beyond its fabled zip codes into politics, the economy, culture both high and low—to hear some foreign policy wonks tell it, even national security!—in short, every aspect of our lives today.

If the entertainment industry affects our national security, explain to me again why we’re only reading about actresses and not those women in the military who are, by Elle’s own postulation, indisputably affected by Nicole Kidman’s next film?

Never mind! Let’s talk about men!

…Anderson Cooper, who is, sorry to objectify, just the most beautiful human on television.

Um, apologizing for objectifying him is pretty much contradicted by the very act of printing that objectification in a national magazine, but go on.

I am sure he loathes any description of himself that starts with his looks as opposed to his hard-won journalistic chops, but perhaps he gets some of the same kind of pleasure that constantly underestimated, beautiful women receive when they succeed at something other than just being good-looking.

Perhaps. Or, you know, perhaps he doesn’t find it pleasurable when people are surprised to discover that he’s competent.

Mercifully, the letter ends shortly thereafter—with, what do you know, an Olsen mention. After tackling that page, I completely understand why Nicole’s head might be throbbing. Good news, though: Botox alleviates headaches!

On second thought, Nicole? Forget I mentioned it.

Wintour Wednesdays: "She Was Fashionably Emaciated"

Welcome to Wintour Wednesdays, our peek inside the unauthorized biography Front Row—Anna Wintour: What Lies Beneath the Chic Exterior of Vogue’s Editor in Chief by Jerry Oppenheimer. Is Wintour’s glacial demeanor affected or genuine? How did she develop her affinity for fashion? And how many decades has she had that haircut, anyway? Let’s find out!

The opening chapters delve into Wintour’s childhood. (I’ll spare you the details about her parents’ college years.) Still, a handful of anecdotes foreshadow the current content of Vogue. Not that her adolescent choices should necessarily be held against her—if that’s how the world worked, I’d be permanently ostracized from polite society on account of a purple satin dress from eleventh grade—but in these instances, plus ça change…

For instance, there is early evidence of her antipathy toward aging:

Anna scoffed at [her teachers], whispered about them, joked that they were so doddering she was absolutely certain their men had been killed in the Boer War. Anna had already developed a thing about age and would later use it as both a creative tool and a weapon when she became a fashion editor.

Delightful! Plus, teenage Anna had already learned to suffer for fashion:

At fourteen, stick-thin Anna watched her diet obsessively, mostly by not eating. Her school lunch usually consisted of a Granny Smith apple. [Her friend Vivienne] Lasky’s mother, a former model, was worried about Anna’s health and thought she was too bony, though Anna felt she was fashionably emaciated… “Anna only ate if it was something special,” says Lasky. “She always has had terrific self-control.” [boldface mine]

Next week: Wintour gets her professional start! Why fashion? “Anna hated badly dressed people.”

Wintour Wednesdays: "She Doesn't Really Like Women"

Welcome to Wintour Wednesdays, our peek inside the unauthorized biography Front Row—Anna Wintour: What Lies Beneath the Chic Exterior of Vogue’s Editor in Chief by Jerry Oppenheimer. Is Wintour’s glacial demeanor affected or genuine? How did she develop her affinity for fashion? And how many decades has she had that haircut, anyway? Let’s find out!

The book’s prologue immediately tackles a burning question: exactly how far removed from reality was The Devil Wears Prada? Turns out, not very much. Author Oppenheimer opens with a glance at a woman on her way to a job interview with Vogue, wearing the Wintour-mandated high heels and bare legs in the dead of winter.

It’s known among the fashion world cognoscenti that Anna is prone to hire based on dress and looks, let alone spike stories if someone is not photogenic enough for her. “If we’re talking about fashion editors, on the whole it’s important to me that they have a sense of style,” she’s intoned. And on the editorial side... “after a few months they will end up looking like Vogue. It just rubs off that way.” As a Vogue editor who knows and abides by Anna’s rules notes, “People who work here have to look a certain way. If somebody hasn’t changed their appearance within six months…something isn’t going right.”

While Wintour appears to be inflexible about her appearance standards, she’s certainly malleable when it comes to intimidation! The interviewing candidate explains:

 “Anna was very, very cool and contradicted everything I said. She would ask me questions and I would answer in the most intelligent way I could, and then she would contradict me. For instance, she said, ‘What would you do in the music section?’ I said something about ‘going very upscale.’ And she said, ‘We’re a populist magazine.’ [Ha!—Ed.] She asked me what I’d do with another section, and I told her I thought that deserved a populist view. She said, ‘We’re an upscale magazine.’ She just didn’t want me to win.”

Of course, our candidate could reassure herself—it wasn’t personal. According to her:

“The thing is, she doesn’t really like women, which is certainly curious for the editor of the world’s most influential fashion magazine for women.”

Curious, sure, but woefully evident in the pages of Vogue.

Next week: Anna’s childhood forays into fashion include modifying her school uniform (ooh, rebellious) and eschewing athletics lest strenuous exercise render her legs misshapen.

Lowest Common Denominator: Lucky, November

$2.99: Lucky’s cover price

$30: Suggested retail of Kim France and Andrea Linett’s new book, “The Lucky Guide to Mastering Any Style,” excerpted in the November issue

97%: Oddly enough, the amount of content in those excerpted pages that looks exactly like every single issue of Lucky

1: Number of times each that the alleged word “fashiony” is applied to the Gap and Banana Republic

2: Staffers who publicly admit to “converting” to Jessica Simpson’s new fragrance, Fancy, after Simpson appeared on October’s cover

31.5: Months, at the current rate of 2 employees per month, until the rest of the editorial staff is engulfed in the Great Simpson Perfume Convergence

10: Brands of non-Simpson perfume advertised in this issue, including—so help me—Fairy Dust by Paris Hilton

“Hugely”: Amount powder could potentially change your appearance, according to “Loose Powder: How and Why” in “Beauty Spy”

3: Number of “dramatically different looks” that can be achieved simply by using a different mascara, according to page 144 of “Beauty Spy”

47: Other life issues, approximately, I need to tackle before I’ll have even the slightest motivation to test  on my own face Lucky’s gripping hypotheses about the transformative powers of cosmetics 

“All the time”: Frequency with which beauty editor Jean Godfrey-June buys “things [she] can’t afford,” as divulged in “The Beauty Closet”

$86,483: Total retail value of all jewelry featured in “The Lucky Fall Jewelry Guide”

56: Number of adjectives and adjectival phrases in “The Season’s Best Coats”

26: Number of apparel items described by those 56 terms

30: Even more meaningless descriptors—like “nonchalant crisp” and “cozy meets flirty”—applied to the ensembles in “A Month of Outfits”

Infinite: Desperation emanating from the pop-up that screams “WAIT! SUBSCRIBE TO LUCKY!” when leaving Lucky’s website

Working Girl Wednesdays: "Girls Who Faint at the Thought of Being a Call Girl Never Had the Opportunity"

Welcome to Working Girl Wednesdays! Need advice on handling the complexities of the modern workplace? Well, fret no more! Whether it’s a senior partner making a move or a catty co-worker plotting for your plum position, Helen Gurley Brown’s 1964 book Sex and the Office has a solution. Every Wednesday on Glossed Over, I’ll present a new tip from the legendary editor of Cosmopolitan. Is her advice utterly ridiculous or startlingly prescient? You decide!

This chapter is called “Some Girls Get Paid for It.” Indeed! The intrepid Helen Gurley Brown interviewed four such women to get the dirt. Sadly, this chapter is far less salacious than any of the previous chapters. Below, the zenith of the chapter’s raciness:

Sadistic acts—which Barbara, Norma, Colleen and Anita loathed—call for double, triple and quadruple rates. If two girls are engaged by one man, each girl receives her individual fee.

Good to know! Insight abounds in this chapter. For instance, a man explains why some women become call girls:

If I interpret Dr. Greenwald’s findings correctly, only a girl with an unhappy childhood or unfortunate early conditioning would be likely to accept a first paid assignment, let alone tolerate the kind of life a call girl leads…My other procurer said, “A lot of girls who nearly faint dead at the thought of somebody’s being a call girl never had the opportunity, you see. If they’d been real lookers and somebody kept offering them a hundred dollars to do what they’re already doing free, who knows how long they’d have held out?”

On the variety of women who choose such a profession:

As to the varieties of call girls, there are all kinds—peppermint, fudge ripple, butter pecan. Some call girls are gypsies—no more able to keep appointments and be a success at call-girling than they are at anything else. Some are shrewd and efficient business women. A friend in the public relations division of an ad agency told me he nearly keeled over the other day when a pro got in to see him by presenting a fake business card. Once inside his office door, she briskly announced that she was a call girl and would like to help him in any way she could with clients. If he was thinking in terms of banquets or large meetings, there were many more like her she could recruit, she said. Phil just listened and let her do most of the talking. It’s so rare that somebody comes in off the street and offers to lift burdens from a busy man’s shoulders that I think he was genuinely touched.

And why prostitutes are like macaroni:

This is a business situation in which a call girl might be introduced: One food-store chain in a city does most of the business. One man in the chain places most of the orders. How is he going to decide which macaroni to give extra shelf space to and possibly promote when all macaroni is good—and if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all? If the chain-store buyer should say to a macaroni salesman, “Joe, you must know some swinging girls,” the salesman might not be inclined to spit in his eye. (Listen, I don’t mean to pick on macaroni. I’m just using it as an example. The salesman of any product that looks, acts, tastes, smells and feels a great deal like the competitor’s could find himself considering the “intrinsic” advantages of calling in a call girl.)

Next week, HGB offers words of wisdom for the wives and widows forced to work!

Lowest Common Denominator: Elle, September

600+: Number of pages in the September issue, according to the cover

636: Actual number of pages in this issue

1.75: Number of hips Jessica Simpson has, also according to the cover

4: Contestants from the upcoming Stylista featured in a co-branded H&M ad (Best quote from one of the contestants: “You can look good in anything as long as you have a smile on your face and you haven’t bad too many Double Doubles.” Thanks for that insight.)

3: Length, in minutes, of a Stylista preview promoted in Robbie Meyers’ “Editor’s Letter”

239,402: Based on the promotional brigade thus far, the approximate number of further Stylista mentions I’m expecting in this issue

2: Ugly Betty characters who receive Joe Zee makeovers in “Style A to Zee”

100%: My expectation that this issue will also contain numerous mentions of Just Shoot Me, since Elle seems bent on cornering the fashion-mag-as-TV-show market

1: Reference to The Lost Boys as the inspiration for gothic fashion, in “Wicked Ways”

$3,840: Price of the “bag of the season,” a snakeskin Fendi, as listed on page 310

0: Percent of people who are not fashion editors who think $3,840 is a reasonable price for a bag for “the season”

Boundless: My incredulity that “short trousers” are in for fall, as shown in “Fall’s Must-Haves.” Can anyone who isn’t a 6-foot-tall model wear these? Would anyone even want to?

90210: Zip code-turned-title of the show Elle deems “DVR-worthy” in “Elle 25” (Okay, okay, I’m looking forward to it, too. Donna Martin graduates!)

428: Page on which Stylista is mentioned AGAIN. This time, an editorial assistant interviews Joe Zee and Anne Slowey, apparently because they so rarely get a chance to express themselves in the pages of Elle

2.333: Pages assigned to “Killer Stiller,” a profile of—you guessed it—Ben Stiller

7: Pages devoted to political coverage

19: Pages of beauty coverage

13: Age difference, in years, between writer Philip Nobel and the girlfriend whom he left his wife to be with, in “Danger Man”

Monthly: Estimated frequency with which at least one of the women’s mags runs a similar story about a man who left his wife in pursuit of a younger woman

40: Age of model Stephanie Seymour, who appears in fashion spread “Forever in Blue Jeans” (and looks amazing, for the record)

23, 20, and 19: Ages of Ashley Tisdale, Zac Efron, and Vanessa Hudgens, respectively, who appear in “High School Confidential”

Working Girl Wednesdays: "She's Not Really That Insulted by His Desire for Her"

Welcome to Working Girl Wednesdays! Need advice on handling the complexities of the modern workplace? Well, fret no more! Whether it’s a senior partner making a move or a catty co-worker plotting for your plum position, Helen Gurley Brown’s 1964 book Sex and the Office has a solution. Every Wednesday on Glossed Over, I’ll present a new tip from the legendary editor of Cosmopolitan. Is her advice utterly ridiculous or startlingly prescient? You decide!

Ready to spend eight hours a day seducing your co-workers? In Chapter 13, “The Office Affair,” Helen Gurley Brown argues that interoffice romance is the natural order of things.

Would girls in offices stay more cold-cream pure if men didn’t tempt them? My friend Charlotte, a wow of a pretty working girl, says, “I don’t believe for one moment that girls in offices are poor little grasshoppers who are preyed on by those mean old praying mantises. A girl can say no. Just plain no.”

…Girls who are bewildered and shocked by a man’s physical interest in them seem to me a little phony too. Girls happen to have a powerful, built-in allure for men. It’s there and God gave it to us. To pretend to be outraged and petulant because a man wants us “that way” is like having the Maltese Falcon buried upstairs in a dresser drawer and acting surprised because Sam Spade and a bunch of hoodlums are milling around outside the door.

Whether a girl says yes or no to a man in the office, it’s my opinion she’s not really that insulted by his desire for her. Unless he is a real monster with one beady eye in the middle of his forehead and long green hair all over his back, I think she will remember most propositions not unkindly. Somebody wanted her. Somebody flipped.

Well, not everybody gives in to these apparently genetic urges:

One girl I know stops short of having an affair—not until she’s married, no siree—but has a trusty office friend who every few weeks squeezes the daylights out of her. Old Mike covers over to her apartment, they have a chicken sandwich, they tussle, she fights like a Zulu and nothing happens. But the physical struggle “gets a lot of it out of my system,” she says. I haven’t talked to this girl in months but I do keep tabs on the strangulations and ax murders in her city. Old Mike could lose his temper.

Next week, three true tales of daring women who had dalliances with co-workers!

Live Blog: September Vogue's 798 Pages

Last week, when I bought an armful of September issues, the cashier at my favorite newsstand said, "You've got your reading cut out for you." Little did he know that I planned to spend an entire day poring over the pages of just one magazine.

For the record: I have not opened this issue of Vogue, nor have I read what any other blogs had to say about anything other than the cover. The only thing I've peeked at was the back cover, because by the time I reach it, I may be too delirious to realize I've reached the end.

Working Girl Wednesdays: "Don't Reach for the Check with Your Limp Little Arm"

Welcome to Working Girl Wednesdays! Need advice on handling the complexities of the modern workplace? Well, fret no more! Whether it’s a senior partner making a move or a catty co-worker plotting for your plum position, Helen Gurley Brown’s 1964 book Sex and the Office has a solution. Every Wednesday on Glossed Over, I’ll present a new tip from the legendary editor of Cosmopolitan. Is her advice utterly ridiculous or startlingly prescient? You decide!

Whether you’re looking to steal from your employer for fun, profit, or revenge, Helen Gurley Brown has some advice for you! But first, some scolding:

If you don’t overreach a little bit, you are probably a silly and a sucker—yet stealing is stealing. If you say that the lunch cost ten-seventy-five when it actually cost five-fifty you are lying, and lying is bad for you. When you operate like a South American dictator, it hurts inside, and that takes some of the fun out of it. Yes it does!...(Never mind what the company can live with. They can live with just about anything, I’ve decided. They’re miserable paranoids about raises and indulgent sugar daddies about expenses.)

Speaking of expenses:

In taking a man to lunch, I suggest you not reach for the check with your limp little arm in his presence—unless you never had any intention of paying. Even if he’s deserving, there’s just hardly a man alive who feels comfortable while a lady hassles with money or even hassles the check.

Next week: The advice about paying for lunch might come in handy. HGB tackles “what happens when lightning strikes”—the office affair!

Lucky Now Loaded with Less Expensive Stuff You Still Don't Need

I have a double standard when it comes to the clothes in magazines: I’m way more offended by a $300 bracelet than I am by a $25,000 ball gown. See, ball gowns exist purely to remind me how plebeian I am. They have nothing to do with real life (or, at least, my life), and I will never have cause to buy one, so I want to ogle only the grandest, most ostentatious gowns in magazines. But when Bazaar recommends I “stock up” on a $325 Chanel bracelet as if that’s a sound way to build an investment portfolio, I’m bugged. Either their math is way off, or I’m going about it all wrong by paying rent before buying baubles.

That’s why Lucky bothers me so much. For a magazine that’s ostensibly about shopping, there's little in its pages that I—or any other trust fund-deprived mortal—could actually purchase. So my curiosity was piqued when Lucky editor-in-chief Kim France mentioned money-related matters in September’s “Editor’s Letter.”

We’ve been quite busy here at Lucky HQ lately, creating new pages…Deal Hunting, in which we present, for your delectation, clothing and accessories that fall into the budget no-shock zone.

“Delectation”? Well, that may be an overstatement. But if you need a magazine to point you to the mall, then these two pages will do the trick! Chains like American Eagle Outfitters, Gap, J. Crew, and H&M are all represented here. Their suggestion of a $49 Nautica rugby shirt is almost insultingly unimaginative, but it’s hard to quibble too much when the most expensive piece featured is a $145 trench coat.

Anyway, not all hope is lost for those of us who enjoy spending money on luxuries like, say, health insurance and groceries. “Style Spy” offers two work-appropriate bags under $100. “My Foolproof Outfit” deviates from its usual high-spending ways, featuring a Manhattan financial adviser whose priciest choice is a $305 Cynthia Steffe dress. And the “Lucky Girl” keeps it almost real, too, selecting a $188 cashmere cardigan, a $15 necklace, and a $166 embroidered canvas bag.

But is this apparent decline in prices merely confirmation bias or an actual shift in Lucky’s editorial?

That’s a question only a spreadsheet can solve! I compared three fashion stories from the August issue with this month’s to find the average price per item.

“My Foolproof Outfit”

August average: $670.11

September average: $181.44

“Lucky Girl”

August average: $220.83

September average: $152.43

August’s “The Lucky How to Wear Your Denim Guide” and September’s “The Lucky Fall Trend Special”

August average: $262.87

September average: $532.45

So not much has actually changed, except perhaps the magazine’s realization that not all of us are willing to trade a kidney for a shearling coat. But that acknowledgment is a step in the right direction, even if does raise a host of questions. Is fashion by its very nature exclusive? Can a wool blazer from the Gap be considered fashion? Am I the only person who doesn’t share Lucky’s penchant for ludicrously expensive scarves? (Check out the $725 animal-print Vuitton on page 326. Ouch.)

I don’t know, and I’m not sure Lucky does either. But I welcome an increased emphasis on accessible apparel in magazines. I won’t ever need a ball gown, but I’d still like to look like I might.