Quoted on the cover:
When I found out, I started shaking.
Which is funny, because that’s pretty much what happened to us when we saw this.
Other unintentionally hilarious cover lines:
1. “How I learned to love the mother I hated”
2. Sexy winter skin
3. Tanning, bleaching, botoxing: Are you obsessed? (Already done.)
0: Number of cosmetic procedures Nicole Kidman claims to have had in “Nicole Kidman Spills…”
0: Amount of credibility that statement holds when compared to the cover photo and this particularly jarring shot (Remember when she actually had pigment?)
$37,990: Price of the YSL Downtown Croc Tote, the most expensive item featured in “Shopping Deconstructed” (The article attempts to answer the burning question, “How can a bag cost more than med school?” We get the how, but we’re still wondering about the why.)
4: Of the seven cars featured in “Primp My Ride,” the number that cost less than the YSL bag (Hence the reason we’re still working on the why. A bag that costs more than a car? Is that ever necessary? Forty grand for a purse is just plain vulgar.)
$20,855: Value of the five ensembles worn by reader Sarah Annibale in “Fashion Boot Camp”
26.8: Percent of the average Marie Claire reader’s household income needed to purchase those same outfits (source: Marie Claire’s media kit, registration required)
$1,385: Retail price of a Versace gold clutch shown in “Clutchy-Feely,” page 64
$650: Price of an Orlane Paris cream containing pure gold extract, as shown in “Beauty Deconstructed”
$797.80: Price of one ounce of gold (source)
5: Pages devoted to the story “Step Away from the Chardonnay!” which is an ever-so-helpful guide to “choosing your booze”
9: Number of pages of Bacardi Rum advertising located immediately adjacent to the aforementioned story (an eight-page insert plus a full-page ad)
2: Pages of alcohol advertising placed elsewhere in the issue
101: Number of readers who appear in for “101 Dresses (on 101 Readers)”
26: Median age of readers depicted in “101 Dresses (on 101 Readers)”
37.1: Median age of Marie Claire readers (source)
$1,320: Average annual per capita income in Bhutan, where fashion spread “A Stitch in Time” was shot (source)
4: Number of items depicted priced greater than $1,320, not including a “price upon request” Maxmara dress
You know, it’s pretty much par for the course that a magazine has the power to make us feel bad about ourselves. Between the impossibly skinny models, their never-seen-the-sun skin, and our apparently inadequate earning power, reading a magazine can sometimes turn into a real battle with our self-esteem
. Last night, we were reading the October issue of Marie Claire, feeling pretty good about our bank balance—until we saw that a $295 Tory Burch dress listed as a “steal.” Suddenly, our mood darkened. A dress that costs a good deal more than our car payment? Oh, sure, what a fantastic way to spend our hard-earned dollars! But was the magazine’s perspective skewed, or are we simply not bringing home enough cash to finance a fashionable life?
Fortunately for our sense of self-worth, the page also suggested a $34.95 H&M dress. (And we aren’t really in the midst of a magazine-induced personal crisis…yet.) Still, we have to wonder who Marie Claire thinks is reading their magazine when such disparate price points are both considered bargains, but we’re digressing.
We’ve been reading fashion mags for the better part of our life (really!), which means we’ve absorbed plenty of stories about men, clothes, and money that don’t even approach our reality. Still, we hadn’t yet read anything that made us feel like we were inadequate in our youth. Until tonight, that is! Who even knew that poor self-esteem could be retroactive? Well, it’s totally possible! How? Well, the September Fashion Mini crowns actress Camilla Belle one of their fifty most stylish luminaries. Then, horrifyingly, the issue confronts us with a detailed account of actress Camilla Belle’s preferences as a ten-year-old—taking us all the way back to 1997.
Although that was the year we turned twenty-one, Belle’s means—not to mention her taste—were already well beyond our reach. Reading her style picks, it becomes rather clear that some of us (and we do mean us) will never quite catch up with the magazine world’s favorite tastemakers. Behind the jump, we compare our picks with Camilla’s, circa 1997. Looks like we can blame our lack of Louboutins on our childhood!
Continue reading "Fashion Mini Celebrates Ten-Year-Old Taste" »
The issue weighs: 1.4 pounds
Issue thickness: an eminently manageable three-eighths of an inch
Who’s on the cover: A surprisingly attractive Ashley Olsen, sporting an indigo Vuitton gown and heavy eyeliner
Why she’s on the cover: Because she and her sister are launching yet another clothing line, this one called Elizabeth and James, as well as a second collection from The Row. Which means people are actually buying pricey clothes designed by Mary-Kate and Ashley, which means their Wal-Mart collections were just a launching pad, which means these two are almost certainly going to take over the world. Brace yourselves.
Who bought the back cover: Emporio Armani Diamonds, with an ad featuring Beyonce. We have no idea what this stuff smells like, but this ranks as one of the most uninspired ads ever.
Cover line that made us cringe:
Shocking! Female suicide bombers
Way to make a serious topic sound like tabloid fluff.
Number of ad pages between the cover and the table of contents: a mere 17
Total number of pages: 284
How many of those pages are ads: 168, almost 60 percent
Subscription cards: Our issue had only one, and it was bound. No pesky flyaways? Nice.
Cosmetic samples: 3 scent strips—Ralph Lauren Romance, Donna Karan Cashmere Mist, and Sarah Jessica Parker Covet. Enough! Our nostrils are on fire.
Is it portable? Oh, yeah. This edition is no larger than the average issue of Vogue or InStyle. We’re ripping out the fragrance strips, though—this thing reeks enough to attract bees.
Newsstand Confession • When we picked up the September Marie Claire with Ashley Olsen on the cover, we immediately flipped it over to see if Mary-Kate was on the other side. Worse, we had a tiny moment of disappointment when we realized she wasn’t.
It’s hard to feel engaged with celebrity profiles. They’re often so carefully orchestrated, so relentlessly false that we might as well be reading a press release. When is the last time you felt like you actually understood someone better after reading about them in a magazine?
Even so, we were unexpectedly pleased by this bit from “Born to be Wild,” the profile of Andy Samberg in the August edition of Elle.
“I feel like there’s so much accepted sexism,” Samberg says. “Everyone talks about doing R-rated movies, and it’s like, ‘Well, you’re going to have some titties!’ And it’s like, ‘What? No! That’s not a sacrifice that we would ever want to make. We love to have cursing, but it doesn’t mean that you have to have a girl take her shirt off…”
So could it be that the Lonely Islanders, who can at times seem a bit unduly preoccupied with their man-flesh…are…feminists? “Ha,” Samberg says, and then turns serious. “Absolutely.”
Andy Samberg is a feminist? As soon as we finish this post, we are going to re-watch “Lazy Sunday.”
Our sudden rush of affection for Samberg is the opposite of our reaction to the Sarah Jessica Parker article in the same issue. Enough with the canonization of her, already. There’s something inherently frustrating (not to mention dull) about an actor who repeatedly tells reporters she won’t talk about her private life. Honestly, we’re contemplating taking up residence in an underground bunker when the Sex and the City movie is released. Quotes like this one from “SJP Inc.” certainly don’t help our raging case of Parker-phobia:
“Don’t you just love Chinatown? Doesn’t it smell amazing?” Sarah Jessica Parker is standing slightly downwind from a stand selling nickel-size, briny dried scallops, acrid tree bards, and a selection of shriveled mushrooms labeled simply CHINESE HERB—in truth, probably not the sweetest-smelling spot in Manhattan.
It’s probably just a personality clash (or, you know, her finely honed sense of smell that she developed in the process of creating not one but two successful perfumes!), but anyone who can wax rhapsodic about the aroma of shriveled mushrooms is far too perky for us. Indeed, we may not be the only ones suffering from Sarah Jessica Parker overload. Coty Prestige exec Catherine Walsh, who works with SJP on her ever-expanding collection of perfumes, tells this story about the star to Elle’s Maggie Bullock:
“I used to send her weekly ratings [for Lovely],” says Catherine Walsh…“When they dropped, she would say, ‘Oh my gosh! Do I need to go to Dadeland Mall and make a personal appearance?’”
Which would seem to be a genuine revelation about Parker’s character, except for the fact that Walsh told that exact same story nearly a year earlier to a different magazine. Here’s the tale as it appeared in the October 2006 issue of Marie Claire:
“When we launched,” says Walsh, “we started to send her sales reports weekly, by store. She would read them, and if we weren’t in the top three names, she’d e-mail me and ask, ‘Is there something I need to do? Do I need to go there?’ I mean, who does that? Even I don’t do that! Carlos and I just looked at each other and said, ‘She’s really going to go to Macy's in Dadeland, FL, because we’re number nine there?’ She just puts you to shame.”
We don’t know what’s stranger, that anyone at Elle found Walsh’s boosterish anecdote worth repeating or the fact that we actually remembered reading the story in Marie Claire last year. Not that it matters much, since “SJP Inc.” is full of rehashes. The piece contains another explanation about the genesis of Bitten and several paragraphs about the SATC film, along with our personal favorite celebrity article trope—the ultra-thin celeb orders multiple entrees, in this case “with gusto,” as if to attest that she actually does eat normally. Yawn. If there’s one thing that’s still interesting about Sarah Jessica Parker, it’s her ability to keep the publicity juggernaut alive, even though there’s nothing new to say. Can the next journalist to interview her please ask about that?
Who says our time would be better spent reading books? Magazines are a perfectly enriching way to spend our
time. In particular, the August edition of Marie Claire sent us on a journey of self-discovery. See, the command on the cover—
Discover Your Inner Fembot!
—immediately piqued our interest, conjuring mental images of the fembots from the Austin Powers movies. While dressing in feather-trimmed teddies and using our breasts as a lethal weapon does seem like a winning lifestyle choice, we weren’t sure we were ready to commit. Fortunately, Marie Claire even included a handy quiz to determine whether we were perfectly suited to the fembot lifestyle!
Continue reading "Marie Claire: Find Yourself...or Find a Man" »
It’s Friday. Let’s talk fashion, shall we?
Reading Lucky’s “Denim Guide,” Marie Claire’s “Denim Trend Report,” and InStyle’s “Jeans A-Z” (in the August issues) has us wondering: Is apparel Armageddon upon us? With the perfect storm of colored denim, skinny jeans, and high-waisted pants, it’s like every awful trend of the early 1990s has been revived all at once. Yes, we realize ranting about this makes us sound old. 
See, by mindlessly following trends throughout our youth, we suffered a ton of denim trauma. In junior high, we pegged our jeans to show off our multiple pairs of colored socks. In high school, we wore super-light washes in a tapered cut and cuffed denim shorts in teal and red (though at least we refrained from wearing ripped grunge-style jeans). And in college, we lived in a pair of brown jeans from the Gap. We cringe thinking about those crimes of fashion we committed so blithely—all we wanted was to be stylish!—so we’re skeptical about the return of denim looks we tried so hard to forget. Won’t someone please make a reasonably modern, flattering, affordable pair of jeans and spare us further retrospective embarrassment?
Our list of the pants we will never, ever wear:
The Oligo Tissew skinny jeans on page 145 of Lucky (at right). They’re purple. And rubberized. And they cost $239. We can only hope the price is a misprint. The mag describes them thusly:
Very Studio 54: They have a touch of sheen and an extra-body-conscious fit.
We guess a Studio 54-inspired trend is a good thing…if you want to look like you were completely high when you got dressed. Besides, we’re 5’1” with hips, and those pants are straining to cover the model’s curves. They are not going to work on us.
The high-waisted Earnest Sewns on page 47 of Marie Claire. For just $240, they come with a complimentary back yoke and button pocket. Exactly like pants we had in fourth grade!
The mag describes another pair of pants as
Disco-style denim…
Disco, Studio 54—we’re sensing a pattern here. Since when is disco-inspired a positive attribute?
In the pages of InStyle, we simply can’t decide which is worse:
Is it Jennifer Lopez’s high-waisted pair with three buttons above the zipper fly (page 169 and at right)? Where do those things end? They’re like a corset and a pair of pants in one.
Or is it the $253 Rock & Republics on page 171 with red lightning bolts stitched on the back pockets? They’re just like a pair we had when we were eight, only exponentially more overpriced!
Not all of it is horrible—we’ll be trying the pinstriped jeans InStyle recommends and the “baby bells” Lucky loves. Or, you know, we’ll just stick to skirts.
What do you think about the new denim styles?
Edit, 6:54 PM: As we learned from Rena herself, her appearance in Marie Claire came about after meeting editor-in-chief Joanna Coles at a party. Her brother did not have anything to do with it. Unfortunately, though we did not (and never do) intend to knowingly post any kind of falsehood, our article gave the wrong impression, and we apologize to Rena.
However, we stand by our opinion on cashews.
There’s a cute if unoriginal idea lurking in the pages preceding the Angelina Jolie interview in the July issue of Marie Claire. In “I Can’t Get Through July Without My…,” 21-year-old political speechwriter Rena Silverman rattles off her must-haves for the month. We hope the statements Rena crafts for Hillary Clinton are more interesting than her picks, which include cashews, Hanky Panky thongs, and a $168 Marc by Marc Jacobs tote bag. Boooring.
Still, we were a bit intrigued, especially because at 21 we were interning for a state official who never learned our name (despite the fact there were only a few other staffers in the office) and whose interaction with us consisted solely of the time each day when we delivered her daily infusion of Flaming Hot Cheetos. We certainly weren’t getting face time with a senator at that age. Since Marie Claire failed to address the question a lot more fascinating than Rena’s love for The Big Lebowski, we wondered: How the hell did she get such an influential job at such a young age? Family connections?
Er...maybe?
Google revealed little, her Wikipedia page is quite vague and poorly punctuated, and even her own site proffers next to nothing that could be considered concrete detail (though it does offer loads of tortured grammar!). While we couldn’t quite figure out how Rena became Hillary’s speechwriter, we do have a hunch as to how she snagged an appearance in Marie Claire.
Her brother, TV producer/recently anointed co-chair of NBC Ben Silverman, is a contributing editor to Marie Claire. According to The Daily, his duties include “submitting story ideas and working on special projects.”
Or, perhaps, suggesting his sister appear in an issue. Oh, brotherly love! How convenient that a contributor had a family member who could appear in the July edition. It’s, like, the most amazing coincidence ever!
And despite her completely pedestrian suggestions, we’re guessing this won’t be Rena’s only appearance in the pages of Marie Claire. Check out this mash note thank you posted on her website:
I was very excited to work with Marie Claire, especially the editors with whom I was working, Lauren Iannotti and Joanna Coles. They are so smart and had such miraculous suggestions I'd have never thought of on my own. They are also, in addition to Hillary, amongst the leading women of today…
“Miraculous suggestions”? We’d hate to see the draft of “I Can’t Get Through July Without My…” without the editors’ input if recommending a leather-bound diary from Barnes and Noble was the best they could muster. Also, seriously, Marie Claire editors are “the leading women of today”? Young Rena certainly has a speechwriter’s gift for hyperbole. She also has a powerful family member, who we suspect may prove far more vital to her success than a handful of cashews.
Photo via Just Jared, obviously
1: Cover credit given to Neutrogena for Rebecca Romijn’s makeup
0: Number of Neutrogena products apparent in the photo of makeup artist Fran Cooper working on Romijn (“Behind the Cover Shoot,” page 20)
3: Number of Neutrogena products recommended in “Sexy Summer Skin”
7.25: Number of advertising pages purchased by Neutrogena in this issue—including one immediately preceding “Sexy Summer Skin” and two more interspersed in the same feature
$1,532: Largest “Splurge vs. Steal” price differential
$85: Smallest “Splurge vs. Steal” price differential
$9.95: price of a K-Mart floral housecoat suggested as “a cool summer dress”
1: Movie declared “antifeminist” (Knocked Up)
1: Movie called “feminist” (Gracie)
8: Women other than Rebecca Romijn Marie Claire suggests could play male-to-female transsexuals
4: Celebs cited for “prominent” noses
4: Plugs for “The Masthead with Marie Claire” podcast
2: Stories about foreign women (profile of the commander of U.N. peacekeeping forces in Liberia; the Turkish honor killings)
3: Stories about American non-celebs (a woman’s essay about her nose; a profile of fugitive Sara Jane Olson’s family; another essay about a married couple who’ve each been married twice before)
24: Pages featuring photographs of actors or musicians, not including the cover or advertisements, and not including models
119: Pages of advertisements, including foldouts and the back cover
Perusing the “Shopping” section of
May’s Marie Claire, we were almost
impressed. Not so much by the aesthetics or the practicality of the
choices (seriously, MC, wearing a thousand dollar dress to Coachella?), but by
the range of prices represented. A $49 pair of sandals? A $44 pair of
jeans? How surprisingly affordable.
Inevitably, our reverie was shattered, and not just by the $120 bangle bracelet
on page 46. No, it all came to an end with “Shopping Deconstructed” on
page 50.
Why Do These Shoes Cost $520?
We love this shoe, and Italian designer Cesare Paciotti promises: “It can last up to 10 years.” But as with any investment, we still wanted to do our research. That meant chopping it in two.
Which could be interesting, right? We’ve never chopped open a shoe, and
we’ve certainly never seen a shoe’s innards. What could be inside to
justify such a price tag? Is the thing lined in cashmere? Stitched
in gold? Is the stiletto made of platinum?
Well, no, but it does have texon. And
sinterite. Nope, we don’t know what that
stuff is either.
Ostensibly, deconstructing the raw material of clothes and shoes to determine their actual worth (and their no doubt staggering markup) could be a consumer-friendly feature. But here’s where the idea failed: By neglecting to adequately explain the value of such materials—and more importantly, completely failing to compare the innards of the $520 shoe with a more moderately priced one—Marie Claire turned this page into just another shill for overpriced designer goods. It isn’t “research” when you don’t have any perspective whatsoever for your findings. It’s intellectually dishonest—not to mention downright lazy—to not even bother to explain how this pricey shoe might be superior (or, gasp!, equal) to one from Payless. Sure, it almost certainly is better constructed, but...One measly sentence, Marie Claire! That’s all we ask!
Instead, without any frame of reference, we’re apparently supposed to take at face value the explanation of why the shoe is worth so much cash. We’re supposed to be swayed by the magazine’s “love” for the stiletto. Sorry, Marie Claire. For us to be persuaded by this page, we’d have to actually value your opinion.
• First, a look at next month’s Vogue and W covers. Shocker! Those are models, not movie stars, on the cover of Vogue. Though if there absolutely must be a celeb on the cover, it’s hard to argue with America Ferrera.
• Jane’s newsstand sales may be flagging, but that hasn’t stopped the development of a
TV show.
• Ooh, juicy. Editors from Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, and Bazaar live it up in New Orleans, while low-level staffers at the magazines have their raises delayed. We expect this incident to spawn at least one more thinly veiled novel about a magazine assistant.
• Is Good Housekeeping going hip? As part of a makeover, the magazine hires editors from Jane and Lucky.
• Is Ashlee Simpson the face of June’s Cosmopolitan? If so, why?
• And Jane Pratt blah blah blah another interview blah blah blah. Yep, even we’re bored with her by now.
Although we briefly noted Marie Claire’s April cover line “My 12-Grape Diet” on Monday, we hadn’t yet read the story. But an intriguing tip landed in our inbox today, prompting us to take a look. If our correspondent is correct, what we found was rather distressing.
The essay, penned by the magazine’s new style director Cleo Glyde, starts off on a bad note. It’s titled
Failure to Lunch
because, apparently, starving yourself to fit an abstract ideal of beauty is hilarious.
In the story, Cleo discusses her modeling career and her concurrent struggle to stay skinny. When she quits the biz, she seesaws the opposite direction, developing a weight problem as she eats to compensate for lost time.
Finally, though, she arrives at what seems to be a fairly reasonable conclusion:
The only real silver bullet was the discovery of my “happy weight” many cities and years later, back home in Sydney: swimming, bush-walking, playing with my son—happy and in love. While I focused on other things, my body naturally stabilized at exactly where it’s meant to be: size 12. And I have come to relish my big ol’ womanly curves…I believe a mantra of self-acceptance needs to be put out there. Once you make your peace with who you naturally are, life’s an incredible feast.
Sure, we’re dubious about the effectiveness of love as a weight loss technique, and it’s grating to be preached to about self-acceptance in a magazine that continues to feature agonizingly thin models, but good for Cleo, right?
Not so fast. Our tipster tells us it wasn’t “bush-walking” alone that got Cleo down to her “meant to be” size. Rather,
“She in fact arrived at [her current weight] after not one but two lipo operations.”
So much for self-acceptance! We can’t vouch for the veracity of the claim, but if it is indeed true, then Marie Claire’s publication of this piece is troubling. It’s not surprising that anyone in the beauty business has had work done, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with liposuction or plastic surgery, per se. But it’s massively hypocritical to proclaim your body “naturally stabilized” at a particular weight if, in fact, your “big ol’ womanly curves” were sculpted by a surgeon. And it would be even more disingenuous to preach the gospel of self-acceptance if your own sense of self-worth relied upon the surgical extraction of fat.
She writes:
Has the tyranny of the super-skinny silhouette gone too far?
Had she written about undergoing liposuction as part of her quest, we’d have found that admirable. But the lack of open discussion about cosmetic surgery (in general) only cultivates unrealistic beauty standards. If Cleo Glyde had work done, yet continues to affirm her body “naturally” reached its current condition, then not only is she complicit in promoting the standards she struggled with, she’s maintaining that same tyranny this essay claims to combat.
• 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.
Even though we wear glasses, we weren’t exactly thrilled to pieces with the beauty story “Specs Appeal” from Marie Claire’s March issue. Why, other than the pun in the title we’ve seen a thousand times over?
This: 
Coordinate your eye makeup with the season’s hottest new accessory, and baby, u got the look!
And u got clear vision, too! Glasses are, like, way more practical than those Lucite-heel Marc Jacobs shoes on page 66!
Note: They really did spell “you” that way in what we can only assume was a vague—and lame—reference to an eye chart. We can’t make this stuff up.
Previously: InStyle did the same stupid thing about glasses as a fashion accessory. When they stop writing about it, we’ll stop complaining about it.
We aren’t expecting Marie Claire to be a bastion of journalistic
integrity, but is it asking too much for its writers to
not develop crushes on their subjects? (Or, at a minimum, could the writers attempt to conceal their true
feelings in hopes of producing a vaguely unbiased and/or non-nauseating story? Yeah, we’d settle for something completely biased but devoid of saccharine.) Writer George Gurley was clearly feeling the
love for Ivanka Trump when he profiled her for “Trump Power” in the magazine’s
February issue. 
Ivanka, the vice president of real-estate development and acquisitions for the Trump Organization, impeccably groomed and straining the buttons of her red shirtdress, picks up a fat stack of papers and slams them onto her desk.
Um, what was the point of that sentence? To not-so-subtly mention her bustline?
By the time we get a few more fawning paragraphs in, George is practically salivating.
Besides the plump lips, Ivanka has clearly inherited a little of her father’s P.T. Barnum instincts…
And then comes this loving description:
She scrunches her velvety brow.
Not to worry, though, just when you can practically see George’s sweat dripping onto his computer as he types up his love letter to Ms. Trump, all his pent-up frustration finds release when interviewer and interviewee meet at a restaurant.
…she offers me a social kiss. Don’t mind if I do!
Oh, how thrilling to see George’s fantasies come to fruition! Fortunately, George spares us the details of how, once Ivanka left the restaurant, he sipped from her water glass and tenderly brushed her discarded cloth napkin against his cheek. After all, it takes a little mystery to make a romance work.
We apologize for the hiccup in our coverage yesterday. Would you believe that we were so upset by the February issue of Marie Claire that we couldn’t stop crying long enough to face the keyboard? No? Okay. But we were troubled by this bit about 41-year-old model Paulina Porizkova in “Gorgeous—At Any Age”:
When Paulina Porizkova moans, “No one flirts with me anymore,” photographer Alexei
Hay smiles, knowing everyone in his studio has flirted with her all day, and the beauty icon is just being her ballsy old self.
Let’s not even get into why a word that means “gutsy” refers to male genitalia.
Sorry, but we fail to see what, exactly, is so brave about Porizkova’s comment. Is it the flat-out lying? Is it the vanity so extreme that she whines when no one—“not even cab drivers,” she says—notices her beauty?
What’s truly bold here—and, yes, truly appalling—is the audacity to complain that her beauty is “being taken away” when that apparently fading beauty still pays the bills. She’s doing a photo shoot for a major magazine, and she thinks no one notices that she’s a beautiful woman? Cry us a river, Paulina.
Even more nervy is that Marie Claire follows that diva fit with “What I Love About Me,” wherein non-models discuss their best features. If the magazine is so keen on women accepting themselves—a worthy campaign, to be sure—they ought to spare us the supermodels caterwauling about their looks.
You know, we sometimes suspect that the women who write fashion magazines exist in a completely separate universe from the one we inhabit, but it’s not often we get proof. Thanks to Marie Claire’s “Body of Evidence,” January, we now realize our hunch was correct.
Results [of a dermatological exam] are kept confidential, although one celeb who aced it appeared on Dancing with the Stars and is famous for his tan (another clue: he shares a surname with the president on the $10 bill).
See, in our world, Alexander Hamilton (whose visage appears on the $10) never served as president.
But, on second thought, why spend our lives governed by actual facts?
Really, we ought to eschew the shackles of truth and instead congratulate Marie Claire for demonstrating the theoretical power of the female electorate. Apparently, MC staffers have the ability to elect a man president more than two hundred years after his death—just imagine what could happen if every woman across the country took part in these totally imaginary elections. Now that’s a world we’d like to live in!
Previously: Allure: Rewriting History, One Sloppy Sentence at a Time
Ever the trailblazer, Ashley Judd has given up on getting attention by talking about her psychiatric treatment and moved on (or is it stepped back?) to getting attention by taking her clothes off on the cover of Marie Claire’s December issue.
As she sort of explains in the accompanying interview:
…the journey for me is releasing myself from the lie that other people’s service work needs to look like mine.
Her journey, apparently, also involves releasing herself from her clothes, but how exactly posing topless for the cover of a magazine advances her cause was left unexplained.
From Marie Claire’s “Love is a Battlefield,” November:
Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms trains the best and brightest troops in the country. It is also home to 12,406 military family members, who watch their loved ones deploy on a weekly basis. Here, we feature the women who keep hope alive on the home front.
And this is followed by page upon page of women staring wistfully in the distance, presumably thinking of their husbands. It’s not the most original of ideas, but we found it to be reasonably well executed.
Until we actually read all of the copy that accompanies each photo and discovered that this story is not journalism.
It’s a fashion spread.
In light of this realization, we’re having trouble deciding what’s more offensive: Is it the way this piece is masquerading as photojournalism? Is it that Marie Claire dressed these women in clothes that, on their husbands’ military salaries, they could never possibly afford? Maybe it’s the implication that we readers wouldn’t be interested in this story if the women were dressed in their own clothes. Or perhaps it’s the thought of the magazine recruiting women for this story, but only women who could fit into the sample-size clothes.
A story on left-behind military wives can stand on its own merit. So can a fashion spread. But dressing up these women in “price upon request” Chloé and then posing them in this spread is misleading and disrespectful. It also dilutes the most compelling aspect of their stories. When women are talking about the sacrifices they’ve made while their husbands are fighting overseas, their clothes shouldn’t steal the spotlight.
Whoa. Marie Claire’s gone snarky. Take a look at this blurb, one of many, from their “Culture” section, November:
What we won’t be covering this month: Sting’s Songs from the Labyrinth; Employee of the
Month, starring Jessica Simpson…
So, let’s get this straight. Marie Claire won’t deign to cover Marie Antoinette, The Santa Clause 3, Rod Stewart, or Evanescence, but they’ll put the star of The Grudge 2 on the cover?
We’re not complaining about their selective coverage. (And, really, aren’t our minds already made up about The Santa Clause 3? Reviews won’t matter.) We’re just saying that they ought to be consistent. We couldn’t possibly stomach reading another drop of ink about Jessica Simpson and her “acting” career, but Marie Claire isn’t exactly increasing its cultural cred by giving the cover to the star of one of the year’s worst-reviewed movies. Apparently, bad movies don’t belong in their “Culture” section, but they’re happy to promote bad movies elsewhere in the magazine.
Marie Claire has a freshly
installed editor-in-chief, which means that there’s now an entirely new person
to pen eminently mockable editor’s letters. We’re especially pained by this little gem in the October missive from
Joanna Coles:
Asked about the risky biz of launching a new scent, [Sarah Jessica] Parker likens it to capturing lightning in a bottle. The ever-electrifying SJP!
“Ever-electrifying”? “Biz”? Gag.
We’re guessing that what Joanna truly finds electrifying is ad revenue—and Sarah Jessica Parker’s newest product just happens to occupy a two-page spread following the masthead.
Coincidence or collusion? You decide. The feature on “SJP,” save the first two paragraphs, focuses entirely on—you guessed it—the actress’s fragrance line.
Not that we aren’t cynical enough to have expected any differently, or that we’re naïve enough to believe that magazines aren’t desperately trying to sell us something on every single page. We just wish for a bit more finesse. By titling the article “Putting On the Spritz,” the sales pitch is ultra-blatant. Why not just run ads instead of articles? Better yet, why not simply print a plea to send cash directly to Sarah Jessica Parker? It may not be subtle, but it’d be far more interesting than a few thousand words chronicling Parker’s adventures in perfumery.
The New York Times says: Ashlee’s Nose Job Was the Last Straw for New
Editor of Marie Claire.
We say: We told you so.
Ashlee Simpson’s fallacious pre-nose job stint as Marie Claire’s spokesperson for positive body image spurred a makeover of the entire magazine—freshly installed editor Joanna Coles plans to reclaim the mag as the “smart girls’ book.” Part of being smart, apparently, is knowing phony when you see it—the magazine received over one thousand letters complaining about Simpson’s bogus body-positive stance in the July issue.
Putting indie film goddess Maggie Gyllenhaal on the September cover of a revitalized magazine that purports to acknowledge its readers’ intelligence may be the best move Coles will ever make. We’re so weary of the deliberate idiocy in magazines (worst offender? Cosmo by a mile) that we’re ready to swear our everlasting devotion to any title making the tiniest effort to be smart.
And devoting additional space to dissing Ashlee Simpson and using the whole debacle as impetus for a much-needed change? It simply doesn’t get much smarter than that.
By special request, this week’s edition of We Read It So You Don’t Have To tackles the article touted on Marie Claire’s August cover as “The Erotic New Trend (Everyone’s Trying It…).”
The “erotic new trend” is fresh,
hot, and boundary breaking—or at least it was three years ago. The dated phenomenon MC so breathlessly promotes is this:
Would You Kiss a Girl?
The magazine reveals that 55 percent of its online survey respondents would be intimate with another woman, an answer that shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s seen an episode of The Real World wherein the cast members get drunk. (We realize that pretty much every episode involves the housemates drinking, but that only proves our point.)
More galling than the fact that this topic is no longer interesting is the awkward juxtaposition of two women who recount their personal experiences with same-sex kissing. One woman is straight and makes out with her friend while drinking at a nightclub. The other woman is a lesbian. Because, you know, a woman kissing her pal to get male attention at a club is totally the same thing as two women kissing because they’re dating.
A caption in the article reads
Madonna did it. Will you?
We say: Madonna did it three years ago. Will you stop writing about it already?
We expected changes at Marie Claire when Joanna Coles took over the magazine, but we didn’t expect that Coles would bring in a fourteen-year-old to write the headlines for the August cover:
Taunting titles like “Perfect Jeans: They’ll Make Your Ass Look Awesome” and “The Erotic New Trend (Everyone’s Trying It…)” remind us that we haven’t seen peer pressure so desperately applied since eighth grade.
We’re not ones to give magazines
the benefit of the doubt, so we’re just going to come out and say it: the
Ashlee Simpson feature story in July’s Marie Claire must be some kind of
a sick joke. Either that, or we’re the
only ones who didn’t get the memo about this being a massive War of the
Worlds-style attempt to fool the public.
Let’s start at the beginning.
Ashlee Simpson’s Body Language
She’s had it with Hollywood’s twisted view of feminine beauty. Her goal: to get women to appreciate their diverse shapes and sizes…
Now, we know Ashlee apparently
appreciates her own, um, shape and size. Except for her nose, of course.
There’s nothing wrong with nose jobs or plastic surgery per se, but it’s hypocritical to fix yourself up with the help of a surgeon and then claim to be some sort of activist for self-acceptance. Her message, unfortunately imparted to the high school girls she’s paired with for this piece, boils down to something like this: “Hey, girls, love yourselves! Don’t listen to what the media says is beautiful! Unless you can afford surgery to fix your flaws, in which case, you totally should!”
And then there’s this description
of Ashlee and the girls painting an empowering mural (in a studio, yet—what was
the point of that? Like the models and photographers visiting an L.A. photo studio are going to see the mural
and somehow learn from it?):
Soon, messages of empowerment appear…Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” blasts through the room…
Oh, good song choice for the event, Marie Claire. ‘Cause, you know, lyrics like “You got the peaches/I got the cream” are incredibly uplifting. Women should appreciate their peaches, we guess.
Ashlee goes on to talk about her breasts—yawn—and relates a ridiculous anecdote about how her burgeoning eating disorder was remedied by a single trip to a steakhouse. Also, she complains that fighting with other women is just “catty girl stuff, totally embarrassing to be a part of.”
Which doesn’t quite explain why, as the article notes, she wrote a song with the chorus “I didn’t steal your boyfriend.” The fighting in public is unacceptable, but slamming your enemies in a TRL-approved single? Great!
Though the article is mercifully short, it is long on annoying. Passages like
…at 21, she has endured her share of disappointments, too…
and
Classic Ashlee: brash, irreverent, real.
make this article read a lot like a puff piece and not much like the supposedly serious issue-tackling article it was intended to be. But, considering the subject, perhaps we should be thankful it didn’t delve too deeply into the singer’s thought processes.
We’re not thankful, though, that Marie Claire didn’t seek out a more appropriate star to champion the subject of healthy body image. Seriously, was a 21-year-old pop star—who, let’s be honest, has a good body by most anyone’s standards—the best person to speak on this topic? Either she said a lot more that wasn’t included in the finished piec
