Glossed Over

The Week: Special Almost-All-Vogue Edition

•    A documentary crew will go behind the scenes at Vogue as Anna Wintour and her minions put together the massive September issue over the next eight months. 

•    In a series of apparently unrelated observations, James Brady queries Glamour’s Cindi Leive about her rumored rivalry with Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Kate White, compares her clothing to Lord Byron’s, and describes her as “tallish.”  Thanks for the insight, Jim.

•    PETA activists picketed Vogue’s holiday party, while straight men boycotted Allure’s event.

•    And Angelina Jolie reportedly clashed with Vogue over the writer hired to profile her for the January issue.  Angelina vs. Anna?  We hope they got that on film.

Wintour Fascinates Walters, Bores the Rest of Us

Anna Wintour may have been named one of the most fascinating people of 2006, but Barbara Walters’ remarkably superficial interview with the Vogue editor-in-chief never even veered close to interesting.

The whole four minutes of laughably easy questions is chock-full of Anna reciting boilerplate.  Still, we did enjoy Anna’s assertion that she was “100 percent behind” The Devil Wears Prada.   Sure, Anna, and the people of Kazakhstan are huge fans of Borat.

She Despises Jane. She Buys Jane Every Month.

We’re no experts in marketing, but for us, the only thing evoked by Jane’s ad campaign has been a persistent urge to vomit.

We’ve been following Copyranter’s continuing series on the ads, which highlight the alleged inherent duality of their average reader. To quote him, “dichotomous does not, like, equal interesting.”  Sadly, the dolts behind the campaign failed to recognize this.  Or that pointing out potential readers’ hypocrises may not, in fact, be the most effective way to encourage them to spend money.

Our least favorite Jane ad?

She’s marched for women’s rights. She’s cried her way out of a speeding ticket.

Because, you know, Jane is all about equal rights. Except when being equal is totally inconvenient. Sheesh—are we supposed to see ourselves in the specious logic behind the ad’s sentiment?

Count us out of that demographic, Jane.

Heidi Klum Is Always the Exception

Women’s Wear Daily saved us from our annual guessing game--not to mention constant jaunts to the newsstand to see if the new issues have arrived--and posted a comprehensive list of September’s cover girls.  Women.  Whatever.

Allure: Mariah Carey
Cosmopolitan: Scarlett Johansson
Elle: Jennifer Lopez
Glamour: Jennifer Connelly
Harper’s Bazaar: Demi Moore
In Style: Jennifer Garner
Jane: Hilary Duff
Lucky: Rachel Bilson
Marie Claire: Reese Witherspoon
Self: Ashley Judd
Vanity Fair: Paris Hilton
Vitals Woman: Heidi Klum
Vogue: Sarah Jessica Parker
W: Kirsten Dunst

Let’s get a few nitpicks out of the way, shall we? 

First, while we’re glad to learn in advance that Paris Hilton will be on the cover of Vanity Fair--that way we can avoid it--we’re a bit miffed that the magazine is lumped in with women’s titles.  We consider it the mark of a poorly run newsstand when VF is filed with fashion magazines rather than with celebrity/lifestyle titles.

Next, can we assume the photos of Jennifer Garner and Demi Moore were done pre-visible pregnancy?  (This is assuming Demi Moore is pregnant at all.)  Heidi Klum is hugely pregnant, but she also posed nude.

Which brings us to the real point of this.  Remember when there were models on the covers of magazines?  (Heidi Klum, being a model-actress, is just barely once again the exception, but see above.)  Are models now relegated to the less-prominent fashion spreads in magazines--the majority of spreads, of course, inevitably snatched up by some up-and-coming actress who can’t wear a dress to save her life?  We love certain actresses (even some on the list above), and we like that actresses display a modicum more variety in body types than do models--it’s refreshing to see short women like Reese Witherspoon and Sarah Jessica Parker and curvy women like Jennifer Lopez on magazine covers.

On the other hand, we don’t read fashion magazines for a dose of reality.  We’re searching for aesthetic superiority, out-of-this-world drama, clothes we could never in a million years afford, and that we’d have no occasion to wear even if we could.  We want our cover models to be impossibly tall and improbably thin, to wear dramatic dark makeup that has no place in real life.  We’re not looking for affirmation.  We want aspiration.

There’s a reason there isn’t a magazine out there featuring 5’1” bespectacled brunettes, and if there were, you can be sure we wouldn’t buy it.  Not unless they put Heidi Klum on the cover.

Chicago Tribune List Causes Riot in New York

We don't put much faith in best-of lists:  they often seem contrived purely to provoke controversy.  And we have our own strongly-held opinions, which almost never coincide with those of the listmakers.

The Chicago Tribune's list of the fifty best magazines is intriguing for a number of reasons, primarily its incredible scope--the list spans from Consumer Reports to Armchair General.  We were pleased to find a few of our own favorites featured--Paste (number 21), The Week (number 41), Country Living (we're kidding about that one, but it's number 22).

Still, like all lists, this one is flawed.  The Tribune placed the Atlantic Monthly at number 17, while the New Yorker trailed behind at number 20.  Okay.  We don't really like the cartoons in the New Yorker anyway.  But they also ranked New York at number 6. 

You see the problem.

Only two "women's interest" titles made the list:  Vogue, at number 8, and Shop Etc., at number 11.  Fan of Anna Wintour or not, we can't argue with the former.  We even refer to the magazine's super-thick August issue as the "Wish Book," just as the Christmas-time Sears catalog of our childhood was called.

But Shop?  While the Tribune staff is making a "cover-to-cover tour," we've found it hard to thumb through; its pages seem overcrowded and its fonts and colors are aesthetically lacking.  We're so turned off by its design it's difficult to evaluate the editorial pages. Still, the Tribune list cites what is, in our view, the title's chief virtue: it is "mercifully celebrity-free." 

One of the best things about lists is that we nearly always discover something new.  So perhaps we'll take a second look at Shop.  But we're pretty sure we won't be expanding our horizons with some of the other titles from the list--Fine Gardening, Traditional Home, and Lake Superior Journal among them.