Glossed Over

Lowest Common Denominator: Vogue, January

75: Number of “hot tips for 2008” promised on the cover

13: Number of photos of “plus-size” models appearing on a pull-out calendar inside the issue

Bucketloads: Amount GlaxoSmithKline must have paid for the calendar, which is an advertisement for weight-loss supplement Alli

Infinite: The disappointment that, other than the Shape Issue, this is the only time we’ll ever see models who even approximate average sizes in Vogue (And let’s be honest—it’s not as if the token appearance of two plus-size models in last year’s issue constitutes a valid attempt to portray a more diverse range of body types.)

$200,000: Amount given to the first-place winner for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, as explained by Anna Wintour

Endless: Measure of our wonder at the workings of  André Leon Talley’s mind, hence our decision to post his quote from the “Contributors” page despite the fact that no actual numbers are involved.  (Except, you know, dollars.)

What is your New Year’s fashion resolution?

“To order custom Charvet pique tennis shorts and silk kneesocks the color of clotted cream and Manolo Blahnik white suede brogues, for spectator sports at the U.S. Open.”

1: First-person essay about abortion, Lori Campbell’s “Private Lives”

1: Irksome photo accompanying the piece.  In it, the author poses with her daughter in the street, while wearing high-end clothes and towering heels.  Predictably, she is thin, white, and attractive.  Would Vogue have published this essay if its author weren’t so camera-ready? (Remind us some time to talk about this more.  The trend of photographing authors and magazine staffers—ahem, Lucky—only lends credence to the idea that you have to be conventionally beautiful to partake of fashion and/or work at a magazine.)

77 and 78: Pages on which this perception is furthered. Matilde Borromeo, the youngest daughter of an aristrocratic Italian family, is described by William Norwich as

...so chicly comported that you just assumed their first baby steps had to have been taken on the deck of some great yacht...Someone asked if she might linger in New York; surely a fashion house or magazine would be happy to employ her.

$250: Price of a pair of Stuart Weitzman heels that Ivanka Trump deems “not wildly expensive”

3: Number of weeks elapsed between model Natalia Vodianova giving birth and appearing in seven runway shows

0: Relevance this fact has to the story in which it appears, “Peerless”

10: Number of women on Vogue’s best-dressed list

5: Number of women on the list who are current or former models (Kathryn Neale, Astrid Munoz, Georgina Chapman, Kelly Wearstler, and Agyness Deyn)

$165: Price of a fedora worn by Kate Hudson’s four-year-old son, Ryder, in “Sunny Side Up!”

W Redefines "Fashion Victim" in Furry Photo Spread

We may not always like W’s fashion spreads, but we do appreciate that they don’t just pose the models in front of a gray fabric backdrop and call it a day.  The resulting photos are challenging and striking, and they always have a point of view.

All of which, sadly, is the best we can muster for “Into the Woods,” August.  It challenged us, all right—challenged us not to throw the whole issue across the room.  It wasn’t just the photos that looked like a child’s birthday party gone horribly wrong:

       
No, what really got to us was the stream of photos of model Doutzen Kroes wearing exotic furs while posed as if dead.  Is implied violence with an added hint of nudity what passes for edgy?

    

    

    

Good job, W!  Nothing makes us crave a Gucci badger fur coat like seeing it on the victim of a crime!  And nothing says high fashion like a dead woman wearing dead animals!

Vogue, Vodianova, Vapidness? Count Us In!

Confession time!  We’ve hardly cracked open the June issue of Vogue.  Maybe it’s the heat, but we just couldn’t bring ourselves to read “Life With Andre” (normally a reliably eye-rolling experience) once we saw it involved Tom Ford.  There was the whole Keira Knightley-with-elephants thing.  And we vaguely recall reading an excerpt from a British novel so drab it literally put us to sleep. 

Yet we are bursting with anticipation over the July issue.  Take a look at this!

Natalia Vodianova, an actual model!   A respite from the glut of actresses promoting summer blockbusters!  And check out those cover lines: Tanning abstinence!  Red lips!  The “manny” phenomenon!  Oh, light and fun!

Not a single one of those items, save perhaps the red lips (which we love, but which we’re unlikely to attempt in the wilting heat of summer anyway), has the slightest shred of bearing on our life.  But when it looks this glamorous, we’ll gladly wallow in irrelevance for a few hours.  We only hope we won’t get so swept away that we feel the need to acquire a manny.

Image from DNA Models via Oh No They Didn’t

Lowest Common Denominator: Elle, May--The Green Issue

3: Number of plus signs on the cover

Just 1, surprisingly: Number of eyebrow-raising suggestions in Anne Slowey’s “Fashion Know-It-All” (“…Palm Springs has the cleanest sidewalks I’ve ever seen, why not be a little risqué and…sport perfectly manicured bare feet?”  Because dirt on the sidewalk is the main reason not to go barefoot, apparently.)

$2,660: Price of Louis Vuitton’s “take on the Mexican shopping bag”

2: Number of Girl Scout uniforms donned by writer Susan Cernek (Though we have questions about how a grown woman managed to fit into a skort reportedly intended for an eight-year-old.  Also why anyone thinks teal knee socks are a good thing in a uniform.)

4: Number of cars advertised in this issue

2: Number of advertised cars that are hybrids

1: Number of movie reviews titled with the name of another current film (The Waitress review is titled “In the Land of Women.”)

2: Mentions of a January day in New York where the temperature reached 72 degrees

1: Mention of Erin Brockovich in an article called “The Return of Erin Brockovich” (In fact, it’s a story about Julia Roberts.)

1: Ad for “natural” American Spirit cigarettes

8: Celebrities profiled as environmental activists of some sort (Laurie David, Sheryl Crow, Kerry Washington, Shalom Harlow, Orlando Bloom, Julia Roberts, Amber Valletta, Angela Lindvall)

25: Pages devoted to those eight

21: Total of mostly non-famous honorees in “The Green Awards”

4: Pages devoted to the awards article

What Do You Call Ten Models on the Cover of Vogue?

With a whopping ten models on May’s striking foldout cover, it’s as if Anna’s trying to atone for a whole year of subpar celebrity covers (like, say, the Nicole Kidman hair debacle or Jennifer Hudson’s strangely protruding collarbone).  Either that, or no model will appear the cover again until 2010.  Which scenario do you find more likely?

[High-res scan from Confessions of a Casting Director via Oh No They Didn’t]

Lowest Common Denominator: Vogue, April

4: Number of body types to “embrace” on the cover (towering, tiny, thin, or top heavy)

10: Number of pages between Scarlett Johansson on the cover and Scarlett Johansson in a Louis Vuitton ad

3: Number of Louis Vuitton items André Leon Talley requires to play tennis, according to “Contributors” on page 128 (gym bags, racket covers, and mufflers)

0: Mentions of Louis Vuitton in “Scarlett Letters,” a profile of Johansson

0: Amount Johansson claims to exercise

More than 0: Amount plus-size model Ashley Graham exercises (“I’m firm...Nothing jiggly.  I have a trainer I work with.”)

$315: Price of a Martin Margiela bodysuit with built-in shoulder pads

1: Number of models referring to her own shoulders as too large, saying she looks “like a football player” (Paulina Porizkova, who previously whined about her looks in Marie Claire)

4: Clothing size worn by model Hilary Rhoda, as stated in “Be A Sport”

12: Size worn by model Crystal Renn, reported in the same editorial

8: Number of pages featuring Hilary in “Be a Sport”

5: Number of pages devoted to Crystal in the same feature

At least 1: Opinions conveyed as fact (“It’s a fact: Clothes look better on a thin person,” in “Walking a Thin Line”)

At least 1: Completely erroneous details reported as fact in the same story (Apparently, Live Journal is “one of the most popular fashion blogs.”)

Marie Claire Editor: "Self-Acceptance" Courtesy of a Scalpel?

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.

Ruffles Are Powerful, and Other Startling Insights from Vogue's Anna Wintour

So we’ve been avoiding the March issue of Vogue because, frankly, that cover photo of Jennifer Hudson bent over, mouth open in agony, scares the hell out of us.  But when we found the courage to flip open the magazine, we only had to make it past 150 pages of advertising to find something equally as frightening—Anna Wintour’s “Letter from the Editor.”  (Good thing we didn’t encounter “Life with André” in those pages, or we probably would have relegated this issue to use as a doorstop.  Or a bludgeon.  It’s heavy.)

Anyway, now that Kim France appears to have renewed her grasp on reality (for now, at least), it’s time to crown a new editor-in-chief whose monthly notes are completely lacking in pretty much every way possible.   

Let’s get cracking, shall we?  Unlike every other editor-in-chief on the planet, Anna’s letter requires two full pages (albeit with a healthy—and much-needed—15-page ad break in the middle).  Taking it from the top:

When we considered which face belonged on this month’s cover—this is our annual Power Issue—the name on the lips of my editors was Jennifer Hudson.  There is no more inspiring example of the power of talent and tenacity than her rise from America Idol reject to Golden Globe winner.

Right.  There is no victory more vindicating than Hudson’s, no tale of adversity more incredible.  American Idol contestants are apparently among the most down-trodden citizens of this planet.

The question of body image is a current one, and I can’t think of a more compelling and beautiful argument for the proposition that great fashion looks great on women of all sizes than the sight of Hudson in a Vera Wang dress on the red carpet.

On the red carpet, sure, but in the pages of the magazine?  Don’t hold your breath.

The model Natalia Vodianova is another woman whose charm and determination are as empowering as her beauty…

Oh, is beauty empowering?  That’s not what we’ve been told.

I’ve always believed that the great models develop the power to exert an individual influence—moral, aesthetic, commercial—on the culture.

Can someone please give us an example of a model having a “moral” influence?  Perhaps because it’s late at night, but we’re having trouble coming up with a single instance to justify Anna’s statement.  Unless Naomi Campbell hurling things at the help is somehow morally compelling.

(One thought about Ivanka: I’ve watched her since she was a teenager, and I continue to take great pleasure in seeing her develop into a woman of real substance.)

Sure, if substance is constituted by having your assistant help you cheat at Monopoly.

[Nancy Pelosi]’s stylish now, of course; but more importantly, she’s made history in becoming the first woman Speaker.

Good thing she mentioned that Speaker Pelosi’s stylish!  That’s the true accomplishment here, isn’t it?

Olivier Theyskens’s spectacular new dress for Nina Ricci, photographed by Irving Penn, is designed to resemble a bird about to take flight.  Jennifer Hudson aside, I can’t think of a more hopeful emblem of the power we celebrate this month.

This missive mentioned politicians, models, and Ivanka Trump, and a “megaruffle” dress and former reality-show contestant (yeah, yeah, we know she has an Oscar) are what represents power?  Funny, we thought power might involve something like the ability to, oh, write something meaningful to millions of women every single month, but we guess we were wrong.

Or we were right.  We bought the magazine and read every word she wrote, didn’t we?

Previously: Wintour: Believe In Yourself, Believe In Your Staff

Marie Claire: A Model Carps, We Cringe

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.

"Stalking" Male Models? Hilarious, Claims Elle

Do you remember MTV’s Daria? There’s a scene in the opening credits where the sardonic title character is sitting in a darkened movie theater. While everyone around her laughs uproariously, she stares blankly at the screen.

We felt a bit like Daria while reading Elle’s “Where the Boys Are,” December. We think writer Maggie Bullock’s exploits are supposed to be funny, but her story only made us queasy.

The tale: Inspired by a friend who habitually dates male models, Maggie attempts to snag one for herself.

It all started with my friend “the Modelizer” and her how-I-got-my-harem story.

A “modelizing” man is a dog, but a woman doing such a thing? It’s, like, completely different. And calling the men a “harem”? We must have missed the memo about how referring to men as your property is empowering.

Anyway, after Maggie asks a model booker for help with finding her dream man (one who can’t drink legally, we surmise), she summons a friend to join her on the road to lechery.

When my co-stalker Malina and I arrive for the spring 2007 collections,…

See, that’s hilarious because stalking’s a light-hearted term (and behavior!) indicating admiration and affection. We’re laughing now.  Right. 

Next, Maggie and her “co-stalker” chat with an underage model at a bar when the subject of his availability comes up.

…Is there a girlfriend back in L.A.? “Maybe.” (Later, back in the hotel, we MySpace him. His girlfriend, 15, is anxiously awaiting his return.)

Grown women checking out young guys online?  Okay, we’ll admit that’s mildly funny—but only because we’re laughing at them and their pathetic behavior, not with them.

But that’s the extent of the humor, intentional or not.  If a man wrote an article about  “stalking” female models, no one would find it amusing.  By proving that women can objectify as well as men can, Elle isn’t being subversive or fresh—just base.  If referring to men as “prey” is supposed to be funny, well, the comedy in this situation is pretty much beyond us. Maybe we should ask our harem to explain it.

See? Not funny.

Daily Mini: Style Icon, Yes; Role Model, Not So Much

From the Daily Mini’s “The 50 Most Stylish,” November:

Kate Moss, model/muse

What can be said about the supermodel’s status as a style icon that isn’t apparent from her legions of copycats? She’s now designing for Topshop, which should make it easier to emulate her.

Oh, please, wearing a sweater designed by Kate Moss isn’t truly  “emulating”  her—it isn’t as if she’ll be wearing those clothes. Besides, a genuine, whole-hearted attempt to be like Kate would require being impregnated by a drug-addled musician, and we’re pretty sure—though by no means certain—you can’t get that at Topshop.