Glossed Over

The Week: Anna Wintour More Fascinating to Herself Than to Anyone Else

•    Anna Wintour is named one of Barbara Walters’ “Ten Most Fascinating People.”  Clearly, Wintour agrees with the “fascinating” verdict—she has three portraits of herself hanging in her office.

•    Brandon Holley tries too hard to stay in touch with her 20-something audience by throwing herself a 40th birthday party complete with a street fight and police presence. 

•    Feel like crashing holiday parties?  Gawker and WWD have dates and locations. 

•    Lucky’s hired a stylist.  We really were concerned about Kim France’s ability to dress herself.

•    And this week’s cautionary tale comes from former Allure staffer Molly Friedman, who, after soliciting beauty products for the magazine and then selling them on eBay, is “pretty much banned from Condé Nast for life.”  Which we think is supposed to be an even worse fate than actually having to work at Condé Nast.

Photo of Anna Wintour from the New York Post

The Week: No Further Cameron Diaz Updates Planned

• At Conde Nast’s holiday party, Anna Wintour and Cindi Leive sit at the grown-ups’ table.

• So Nicole Kidman was supposed to look like that on the cover of Vogue?

• Lucky’s losing its senior fashion editor. Now who’ll help Kim France get dressed?

• And if you’ll indulge us in some self-promotion, we have a (somewhat serious) short article, “Youth and Consequences,” about fashion mags’ treatment of aging, in the Winter 2007 issue of Bitch magazine, which goes on sale this week. Further incentive to pick it up: Bitch’s always spot-on  “Jane Petty Criticism Corner.”

What's Wrong With This Picture? Shopping Mag Editor Hates Season of Rampant Consumerism

Kim France of Lucky has now publicly denounced the holiday season, thereby devastating any remaining chance of anyone in America ever liking her.  In December’s “Editor’s Letter,” she complains:

The carolers, the decorations, the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree—the charms of all of these things are lost on me.

So, basically, Christmas is to Kim France what Kim France is to us.

On that heartwarming note, we (unlike some editors) plan to fully immerse ourselves in the Thanksgiving spirit and enjoy the holiday, and we hope you will as well.  We'll see you on Monday.

Lucky: But How Will Your Life Affect Me?

We’ve said some unpleasant things about Kim France, but we’ve never called her a liar.

Until now.

So when she [Lucky’s market director Anne Keane] came to me in April, closed the door behind herself, and blurted out, “I am with bun in oven…”

“I am with bun in oven”? “I am with bun in oven”? Oh, come on, Kim. No human being has ever uttered such an overly precious phrase.

That accusation off our chests, we can state with confidence that the rest of Kim’s “Editor’s Letter,” November, is absolutely true. How do we know? Because it’s packed with the same self-indulgent babble Kim foists upon us every month. Like this:

…I knew that we were about to witness an exceedingly well-put-together pregnancy. And indeed, Anne has let none of us down.

Oh, good, we’re so pleased that the woman whose body is going through momentous changes while she produces another human being hasn’t let Kim down by wearing comfy shoes or a baggy top. No one would want Kim to be disappointed, right? No one should sacrifice style for comfort, and certainly not while pregnant, and definitely not in front of Queen Kim!

Just as Kim counts on Anne’s fashion sense, we can rest securely in the knowledge that, no matter what Kim France encounters, she will inevitably make herself the center of the story.  She does it so well, it’s like she practices.

Oh, right.  She does.

The Un-Lucky Search for the Perfect Purse

In October’s “Editor’s Letter,” Lucky editor-in-chief Kim France laments an “It Bag” that she deemed wholly unsuitable:

I prepared to spend a fortune, then went to the store, surveyed my choices, and edited my selection down to one. But in the end I couldn’t go through with it: The bag was fabulous, but what it telegraphed about me wasn’t, in fact, me.

But instead of expressing herself through the purchase of a stylish bag, Kim instead decided to take herself very, very seriously and write excessively personal editor’s letters.  We can only hope that, this fall, Kim finds a bag she truly adores.

Kim France Requires Attention, Pajamas

In what’s becoming a tradition around here, we now present a selection from Lucky’s “Editor’s Letter,” July—ironically titled “Summer with Dignity”—wherein Kim France tells us more about herself than we ever wanted to know.  Are you sensing a pattern?

“You need a dress in which all you can feel between the fabric and your skin is air, that on nights when you can’t be bothered to change can double as a nightgown.”

There you have it: the editor-in-chief of a national magazine just admitted that she doesn’t wear any kind of undergarments.  How else could you feel nothing but air between the dress and your skin?  Normally, this wouldn’t interest us, except that the Calypso Christiane Celle dress featured as meeting these criteria is white.  As in see-through.  As in choosing to wear the gown without the proper underpinnings could make quite a statement.

(We briefly considered that Kim’s implied suggestion to wear a sheer dress without underwear was supposed to be fashion advice.  It is, after all, the ultimate way to avoid unsightly panty lines and bra bulges. But we digress. And perhaps we take things too literally.)

Then there’s the revelation that she sometimes wears her street clothes to bed. What, is she trying to save a few quarters on laundry? It’s not a big deal, really, except that it (like her divorce) never needed to be announced to the world via a page in her magazine.  If you’re the editor of a fashion magazine, don’t you need to carefully craft your image? Wouldn’t you want to follow Anna Wintour’s lead and maintain a mysterious public persona? And perhaps most importantly—to us, anyway—wouldn’t you want the world to believe you had an entire bureau full of designer sleepwear?

Or, failing all that, wouldn’t you at least want your readers to believe that you’re not frantically seeking attention by treading perilously close to TMI territory every single time you pen a few paragraphs for your magazine?

Yeah, that’s what we thought.

Lucky Chief: Nothing to Say? No Problem!

Kim France continues the tradition of her monthly “Editor’s Letter”-cum-pity-party (this month’s title: “A Girl Can Dream”) with a personal revelation: for reasons never explicated in the pages of the June issue, she just can’t tear herself away from the Lucky offices. Here, in her own words, is the sad story:

Much as I adore the warmer months, it has been ages since I have done anything to avail myself of their charms. I haven’t taken a proper summer vacation—to an actual destination—in over two years. And maybe I won’t even get to it this time around.

There are other not terribly interesting revelations, too: she has a space heater next to her desk (“and yes, I do actually have one,” she writes, as if it’s completely out of the realm of normalcy that an air-conditioned office building would be uncomfortably cold), she worries about staining a pricey purse, and she fantasizes about tossing her Blackberry into the ocean.

Sounds like pretty standard fare to us.  Instead of having the art department cut and paste her photo into wacky vacation-like situations (Look! It’s Kim in a jeans and blazer, poolside, her picture inserted with no sense of proportion at all! She’s as big as the pool! How very clever!), maybe it’s time to take a real trip. A long trip. A trip where something actually worth writing about could occur.

We would urge her to fill us in if she actually does take a vacation, but we’re quite certain she’d devote an “Editor’s Letter” to the occasion. After all, any trip—even a taxi ride to another borough—is bound to be far more interesting than what she’s writing about now.

Previously: Kim France Still Desperate for Attention; Now Which Staffer Will Take Care of Her Hair?

News: A Whole Lot of Schadenfreude

■ Sheryl Crow, fresh off the Allure cover commemorating her breakup with Lance Armstrong, will pose for the September edition of Glamour.  Hopefully, the trend of putting recently single women on magazine covers will stop here.  We’ve already heard more than enough about Jennifer Aniston’s glamourous “new life”; we aren’t exactly on the edge of our seats waiting to hear all about another jilted woman’s newfound inner strength.

■ Later this spring, Cosmopolitan (along with a number of other publications) will run an ad from the Magazine Publishers of America encouraging companies to buy advertising space in the print media.  We aren’t marketing geniuses, so we’re not sure how buying ad space in order to promote the concept of buying ad space works, exactly.   But we’re sure the MPA ad will stand out—it’s bound to be the only page in that magazine without a shirtless guy or some mention of sex. Or both.

■ Kim France feels so threatened by the success of Shop Etc. that she spread a rumor about the rival shopping title.  Apparently, at Lucky magazine, it’s perfectly acceptable to act like you’re in seventh grade.

Kim France Still Desperate for Attention

We wanted to give Lucky’s editor-in-chief a healthy amount of leeway, given March’s “Editor’s Letter” confession of physical trauma. (We know we tend to be cranky when ill or in pain.)  Despite our best intentions, we found it nearly impossible to do anything but cringe.  Judge for yourself:

It was with a great deal of self-pity that I edited this month’s rather gorgeous Shoe Guide.   I’ve been having foot trouble lately (stick with me please—I am going somewhere with this), and at the moment, unless I am wearing sneakers, clogs, or the flattest of boots, I cannot make it around the corner.

If it were interesting, Kim, you probably wouldn’t have to ask us to keep going.  Because we’re gluttons for punishment, we did keep reading, but more in the can’t-tear-our-eyes-from-impending-doom sort of way than the fascinated-by-podiatric-matters sort of way.

And, in any case, the minuscule amount of sympathy she’d managed to drum up was immediately wiped away by the next few sentences.

And while there are some lovely flat- and low-heel categories to get excited about, the rest of the pages leave me with the precise feeling I get while looking over the part of the real estate section where the homes I cannot afford—and will probably never be able to afford—are listed.

Charming, no?  We simply can’t decide what’s more off-putting:  the impression that she’s drowning in the depths of self-pity (oh, those houses she’ll never be able to afford!) or the outright bitterness about, of all things, SHOES.

If we feel this, um, conflicted about someone we don’t even know, what must her friends and colleagues think? When Kim described assembling “my panel” (yes, she really did refer to them in print as hers) to glean advice on spring fashion trends, we got something of an answer.

What I got was tough love—a bit short on the love, perhaps—but I’m trying to take it all in the spirit in which I can only hope it was intended.

And she also maintains a hearty sense of denial! 

Is Kim France thoroughly deluded, or might she actually be surrounded by people who despise her?  Based solely on her monthly missives (and our fond but apparently outmoded memories from the days of Sassy), we’re going with the latter.

Further evidence of Kim France’s inappropriate candor: All This and Health Insurance Too; How the Other Half Lives

Now Which Staffer Will Take Care of Her Hair?

Kim France shouldn’t have titled February’s missive “Shoot Me Now.”  If she’s anything like her editor’s letters indicate, a member of her staff may well take her up on the offer. 

Not that we condone violence.  We just don’t believe in tempting fate.

As usual, the page’s content was grating. Writing that she engaged in a “whisperfight”—yes, as one word—with Andrea Linett worked our nerves, but it was the first vignette she related that really sent us over the edge.  Here’s how it played out, accompanied by a headless snapshot (tempting fate again!) of Kim:

Recently, our fashion director Hope Greenberg came over to my house, dumped all the contents of my closet onto my bed...

…where she already keeps several outfits, as we learned a few months back.  Wonder if Hope had to dig through the sheets for the rest of Kim’s clothes?

I would have happily paid Hope for her efforts...

...but her duties at Lucky include providing personal services for the editor-in-chief.  Just ask Jean Godfrey-June.

I should add, however, that her goal was not entirely altruistic: She and the rest of the fashion crew are simply dog-tired of hearing me whine and drone about how I can’t get dressed for anything: not work, not parties, not to walk the poor dog.

In short, she did it to shut me up.

And we certainly can’t begrudge Hope Greenberg for wanting that. We’re just going to consider ourselves lucky (pun intended) that we’ll never be conscripted into Kim France’s service in order to keep her quiet—we can just turn the page.