Glossed Over

The Week: Like Jane Pratt Needs More Attention Right Now

• In an attempt to counter anything they’ve published that might make you think they aren’t proponents of feminism, Elle hosted a panel discussion about women.

• Jane Pratt announced that, back when she was still relevant, she had an affair with Drew Barrymore, and said we can “speculate if [we] want” about a rumored magazine collaboration with Gwen Stefani.  Which means they’re launching a new mag, obviously.   

• Speaking of Jane Pratt being relevant, Mediabistro interviewed the authors of the upcoming book about Sassy called How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter To The Greatest Teen Magazine Of All Time.

• Radar weighs in on Vogue’s shape issue (sorry, we couldn’t resist the pun), while Counterbalance opines about the April issue’s book reviews.

• And a Glamour editor is grooming the next generation of “beauty gurus.” Oh, good, we can’t think of a better role model for today’s girls than one who introduces them to nail polish. [via Gawker]

The Week: At Last, Cringe-Free Cover Photos

• April issues are coming over the transom: Reese Witherspoon looks fierce in Bazaar, Scarlett Johansson wears dark lips and short shorts in Vogue, and both constitute massive improvements over last month’s horrifying cover shots of Katie Holmes and Jennifer Hudson, respectively.

• Still more changes at Elle: While a new design director comes on board, other staffers make a blatant attempt to guest-star on The Hills by defecting to jobs at Teen Vogue.

• The New York Times’ Cathy Horyn asks why anyone except “daughters with lucky DNA in New York and L.A.” should care about Vogue.  We agree.

• And Conde Nast plans to launch a new web network, featuring content from Jane, Self, Allure, and Glamour. Like reading the magazines once on paper isn’t punishing enough.

A Jane-Inspired Rant on the Nature of Talent...and Uggs

From Jane’s fashion editorial “Great White,” March:

It’s almost eerie how these eight emerging talents with amazing personal style are all obsessing over the ethereal white dress right now.

Eerie, indeed, if you consider a stylist dressing eight women in white dresses to be a strange coincidence.

And who might these “emerging talents” be?  While we have no argument with featuring the likes of designer Erin Fetherston or Kate Sennert (editor-in-chief of Tokion), we have to question the inclusion of Molly Hanrahan, age 24.  Her claim to greatness?

What she does: Casting agent for MTV reality shows

Oh, right, because it takes tremendous skill and vision to find promiscuous alcoholics to appear on The Real World.

The “emerging talent” featured on page 121 is even more ludicrous.  Guess who?  It’s Jane’s own Stephanie Trong!  How very self-congratulatory of Jane! How fortuitous that the magazine employs someone qualified to appear in its very own photo shoot!

Here are Stephanie’s intriguing thoughts on fashion:

“Stylistically, I love hippie girls—like the ragtag ones who will throw on anything,” Stephanie says.  “The dress I’m wearing here is really special, because I’m posing with the designer, Catherine.  I was accosting her throughout the shoot, ‘cause I need to buy it.  It’s so innocent.  I can’t wait to wear it in the summer with moccasin booties.”

So the dress is only special because the designer is right next to her?  Somehow, we don’t think that’s what she meant to say. 

Note to Jane: posing your models flat on their backs in tall grass doesn’t exactly show off the clothes to their best advantage.  Note to Stephanie: Moccasin booties?  That’s a joke, right?  We hate moccasin booties as much as we hate Uggs, and we loathe Uggs because we live in L.A. where every time the temperature dips below 65, the entire population of under-21s switches out flip-flops for Uggs instead of just, you know, putting on some jeans, and you can’t leave the house without encountering a phalanx of college students in their ridiculous uniforms of denim minis, tanks, Uggs, and scarves.  Scarves!  With tank tops!  Has everyone gone mad?

Anyway.  We know not to expect much from Jane.  We can’t possibly agree with them on the merits of every single woman they feature in the magazine, but we don’t hate Drew Barrymore.  So, feeling optimistic (and generous, might we add), we headed to the magazine’s website, supposing perhaps Jane might redeem itself with the April issue.  Wishful thinking, we realized, when we learned that Avril Lavigne is on the cover.  We can only hope they selected her for the cover solely because her name means “April” in French.

So we’re going to back up a step and reconsider our earlier opinion.  If Avril Lavigne is Jane’s idea of established talent, we’ll take the “emerging” stars any day.  Hey, we bet that woman who casts for MTV can even clue us in on a great place to have a drink.  Now that’s a useful skill.  Promoting “ragtag,” “hippie” fashion?  Not much of a talent, if you ask us.

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.

The Week: Simple-Minded Simple Life Stars Land Bazaar Cover

• First, a bit of Glossed Over news.  We’d love to hear more like this.  Got dirt?  Email us. Also, we’ve added Twitter to our front page for quick updates.

•  Hankering for more thinly veiled, poorly written “fiction” about a spunky editor being deposed from her eponymous magazine?  Gawker’s got another installment.  Or hear the actual story from Jane Pratt next Friday.

•  Anna Wintour hates the word “blog” and has ordered her staff to come up with a replacement immediately. 

•  W, Glamour, and Vogue were nominated for National Magazine Awards.  We aren’t sure why either.

•  And in case you needed another reason not to read Bazaar, the June cover will feature Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.  Pass!

The Week: Now Officially Sick of Jennifer Hudson

•  Marie Claire staffers are reportedly fleeing the magazine.  What, are they not getting enough screen time in “The Masthead with Marie Claire”?

•  Elle Executive Editor Alex Postman tells Mediabistro that, when interviewing candidates for a job, she asks about their reading habits.  Good news, job applicants: If you’ve managed to read every word on the magazine’s cover, you’re hired.  (And we promise to never trot out that joke again!)

•  Catfight!  Jennifer Hudson and André Leon Talley are still arguing over that ugly bolero.

•  And these excerpts from former Jane staffer Karen Cohen Yampolsky’s “novel” about Jane Pratt reveal the inner machinations of the magazine industry. Also, they reveal that Yampolsky is an exceedingly bad writer.

The Week: Anne Slowey Still Hasn't Eaten a Thing

•  If you’€™ve been lamenting that In Style is too heavy to carry around, fret not!  Now, in a move every other magazine will soon follow, style content is available on your cell phone.

•  Debate continues over the veracity and/or sanity of Anne Slowey’s self-reported Fashion Week diet.

•  Jane wants you to take your top off.  No, seriously.

•  Speaking of topless women and Jane, this is pretty much all you need to read from the Drew Barrymore interview.

•  And after receiving yet another hilariously awful email from Bazaar’€™s subscriber customer service, we found a phone number (which, naturally, was on the website all along).  We’ll have a full report on our call next week.

Jane Staffers Obsessed with Movies, Prostitution

It’s a bit like Christmas around here when our issue of Jane arrives—it’s always a treasure trove of completely ludicrous details.  Like March’s “Fashion Glossary”—is there really anyone out there who needs this magazine to explain Alaia?  Anyone who’s seen Clueless knows “it’s, like, a totally important designer.”  Love that scene!

Anyway.  We were genuinely pleased to see the March cover proclaim

Class up your pad for pennies

Because, hey, our place could use some sprucing up, and we can’t start buying home décor magazines or we’ll completely run out of usable surfaces.  (You have a stack of Lucky back issues on your kitchen table, too, right?  Reading a dozen titles a month is a serious space commitment.) 

There are only three articles in the “Home” section.  Though the cover line refers to page 80, we figured we’d flip through all three.

First,

Good Evening, Vietnam!

Oh, what a timely movie reference in the headline there!  But this article has recipes—not what we’re looking for.  Next.

Cohab Rehab

She loves fringe, he’s into steel

We stage an affordable intervention.

This might be useful, except the magazine has none of the pertinent details (unless you consider the fact that the couple in question met online to be pertinent) and instead refers us to Jane’s website.  Which still contains content from the February issue.  Strike two.

Chandeliers for Renters

Instantly class up the joint with one of these candelabras

This one page, then, is the sum of all the decorating advice in the magazine and the “class[ing] up ” mentioned on the cover.  And some, er, interesting advice it is:

Besides offsetting the mess, the low light makes it easy to pretend you’re a French whore getting ready to go out for the night.

Looks like someone had Belle de Jour in her Netflix queue recently!  Sure, pretending to be a whore is a rather odd way to “class up ” an apartment, but those French women do have an inimitable sense of style. 

We Read It So You Don't Have To: Jane's Guide to Quick Cash and Petty Lawbreaking

In the February issue, Jane goes with a service-oriented piece (sort of).  In “Make $1,000 in Five Days,” we follow the adventures of writer Annemarie Conte, who needs to garner a grand, stat.

When we read the story’s title indicating her urgent need for cash, our heart flooded with sympathy.  Poor thing, we thought.  She’s so desperate for money, she must be facing a terrible quandary…like a plumbing catastrophe, or an emergency vet bill, or a last-minute plane ticket to visit a sick family member.

Well, no.  See, Annemarie needs the cash to buy a 22-year-old diesel Mercedes.  Which she’ll mine for spare parts for the 22-year-old diesel Mercedes she already owns.  Did we mention she’s buying the car off Craigslist?

But who are we to judge how she spends her cash?  We’ve certainly dropped some dollars on foolish things like, say, this issue of Jane.

Here’s how Annemarie’s quest shook out.

1. Pet-sitting nets $40 for three hours.

2. Testing a new foundation brings in a robust $120.

3. An office bake sale garners $60.  Of course, this method only works for people with the ability to walk around their office building selling homemade baked goods instead of, you know, actually working.

4. $15 for an hour of babysitting.  Turns out caring for another human being pays only marginally better than caring for a dog.

5. $50 apiece for transcribing an interview and $50 to pick her parents up from the airport in her 22-year-old car.  Yawn.  Is this Seventeen?  Is she going to mow her neighbor’s lawn and wash her big brother’s car next?

6. Annemarie decides to deliver furniture from Ikea to the city in a friend’s borrowed car and makes $315.  Afterwards, she opts out of refilling her pal’s gas tank.  She may be flush with cash, but she’s awfully inconsiderate.

7. $60 for selling two homemade lasagnas.

8. A $10 cut of the proceeds for letting friends bet on how quickly she’ll manage to get drunk at an event.  Classy!  (Oh, and she managed to guzzle eight beers before failing her pals’ hand-eye coordination test.  We’re sort of in awe.) 

9. $100 for selling friends’ stuff on eBay.  So now she’s feeding them, caring for their offspring, entertaining them by letting them bet on her liver, and selling their stuff?  What do her friends do all day?

10. Undisclosed amount for selling alcohol at work.  Because, of course, it’s legal to sell booze and socially acceptable to partake in the workplace.  On the other hand, if drinking is a regular thing at Jane HQ, it explains an awful lot about the magazine.

11. $120 selling homemade t-shirts at a Giants game, once again skirting the law by neglecting to secure a permit. 

At the beginning of her money-making marathon, Annemarie writes

I will not whore myself.  I will not whore myself.

which implies there were some laws she wasn’t willing to break in the interest of a good story.  Still, wouldn’t “magazine writer turns tricks for a grand” (or sells drugs for a grand, or auctions spare kidney for a grand) have made a far more compelling story?  We think so. In fact, if she’d been selling plasma to earn cash for the car, we might have even chipped in.

Jane Reveals Starlet's Beauty Secret, Own Penchant for Cloying Language

From Jane’s “Primp,” December/January:

Laid-back makeup artist Fabiola created three looks to sexify your winter rut.  Her A-list clients (like Mischa Barton) will prob’ly want ’em, too—just a twinsie warning.

A “twinsie” warning?  Oh, right, because it’s the makeup that keeps us all from looking just like Mischa Barton.