Glossed Over

Lowest Common Denominator: Glamour, September

3: Number of exclamation points in the coverline touting the Jessica Simpson story

$13,000: Value of “stuff you want” that Glamour is giving away, per page 64

1: Number of days editor-in-chief Cindi Leive’s assistant spent dressed as Lady Gaga for the “Dare of the Month”

3.5: Time, in minutes, before most women would be sent home from the office if they showed up in fishnets and a leotard

So, so much: Amount I covet the Hugo Boss bag in the ad following page 78

12: Size clothing worn by model Crystal Renn, whose book, Hungry, is reviewed in “Do Get the Season’s Stylish Reads Here,” complete with an excerpt of a “moment we love”

Perhaps 1: Number of size-12 models photographed by Glamour for this issue (keep reading)

2009: Year in which Glamour apparently thinks red lipstick was invented, given their extravagant praise of the stuff on page 89

3: Pages of lipstick ads surrounding the aforementioned feature (1 immediately before and 2 right after)

Nil: Value of the advice given by Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana to “play up your prettiest parts.” Really? I shouldn’t highlight my worst features?

100: Page on which Faith Hill recommends Coldplay. You know, they’re that obscure new band you might otherwise have never heard of?

100: Coincidentally, also the page on which I lost my patience with mega-rich celebrities sharing their “knowledge.” See also: why I don’t subject myself to GOOP

50: Percent of men surveyed by Glamour who told the magazine they “groom their privates”

15: Age, approximate, at which I last used the word “privates” non-ironically

1987: Year in which pleated high-waisted pants, like those shown on page 116, should remain. What’s next, paperbag waists?

Zero: Amount the use of “Kate Moss” as a verb, as in “11 Touches That ‘Kate Moss’ Your Wardrobe” on page 133, should be tolerated. Please stop. Now.

5: Number of “fantasies he’s having about you right now” and suggested “real way[s] to romance a guy,” as detailed in the “Men, Sex & Love” section

194: Page you should turn to right now to see a model who actually might be a size 12

+1: Points for featuring Robin Givhan in “Meet the Woman on Michelle Watch”

-10: Points for the article not actually being about Givhan, despite its title

35: Percent of survey respondents who think cover star Jessica Simpson should reunite with ex-husband Nick Lachey

Infinite: My astonishment that people actually have an opinion about who Jessica Simpson should date

0: Approximate number of Americans other than me who have neither read nor seen any part of the Twilight series. Four of the films’ stars appear in a beauty feature called—what else?—“Twilight Beauty”

+1: For including a same-sex pair in “Secrets of Happy Couples”

2,497: Estimated appearances of Clinique’s Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion in stories similar to “24 Best Beauty Buys Now”

36: Financial tips dispensed in “Your Money,” starting on page 268

Not surprisingly, 0: Recommendations in the aforementioned article to invest in clothes or shoes

4: Violent incidents mentioned in “Sex with a Stranger”

1: Number of men in the same article confessing to “really want[ing] to kill” a woman because she wouldn’t have sex with him

5: Meals actress Meryl Streep claims to get from a single chicken in “Hey, Glamour Readers! Julia Child is Making You Dinner”

The 20 Life-Changing Lessons in September's Cosmopolitan

Until I read this month’s issue, I thought Cosmopolitan was like the TSA: a mostly pointless institution that nonetheless will never go away.    

It takes a big person to admit they were wrong. So, I’m just going to come out and say it: I’m a big person. The September issue was full of top-notch journalistic insight and information that will undoubtedly change my life—and yours, too!

Here are the top twenty things I gleaned from those precious 262 pages:

1.    “Hoo-ha” an acceptable word to print on a magazine cover. But is it better than “va-jay-jay”?

2.    Cosmo’s reporters doggedly pursue their subjects in a quest for truth. For instance: After a showdown that must have rivaled the Frost-Nixon interviews in tension, actress Kristen Bell finally admitted that—ready?—she eats no salad dressing except Bob’s Big Boy bleu cheese. Scandalous!

3.    Interacting with a male in the wrong way can have disastrous consequences. That’s why “Grab His Butt Like This” so painstakingly described four different ways of, well, grabbing a man’s butt. The stakes are high!

4.    At last, there is a cure for the dreaded football addiction that strikes so many men. And about time, too, because there’s no way we would enjoy watching football with them! (“The Guy Report,” page 76)

5.    The Rolling Stones are relevant in 2009, because a $44 Stones logo tee is a must for fall. Guess my New Pornographers t-shirt needs to hang unworn in the closet until I’m eligible for Social Security. (“8 Must-Have Items,” page 83)

6.    It’s possible to be “ballsy” and have a hoo-ha, and the best way to demonstrate that is by pairing socks with high-heeled sandals! Could this be the fourth wave of feminism? (“Ballsy Looks to Try Now,” page 86)

7.    Someone at Cosmo thinks “brond” is a word meaning a mix of blond and brunette hair. And I’d pegged “shootie” as this year’s ubiquitous portmanteau!

8.    Camilla Belle is more well-known than I thought. Cosmo surveyed 100 men to find out which shade of lipstick they prefer on her, and none of the responses were “Who’s Camilla Belle?”

9.    Actress Anna Faris is “ballsy,” just like socks and sandals! Good for her! She even has a hoo-ha. (“Fun Fearless Female,” page 120)

10.    Cosmo girls aren’t concerned with a man’s looks. That’s why the magazine devised a “Stud Meter” to inform readers of famous men’s physical charms. Among the findings: Ryan Reynolds and Chace Crawford are more attractive than a cross-dressing Mariah Carey or Coolio. Yes, Coolio. If the Stones are relevant now, his time is coming!

Glamour Takes On Gossip Girl's Prohibitive Purse Prices

The July edition of Glamour’s “Dos, Don’ts, News & Views” compares the accessories of TV characters. Deeming a Jimmy Choo bag acceptable for a thirty-something denizen of Lipstick Jungle, the mag goes on to declare a Constance Billard freshman’s $2,495 Valentino tote unrealistically expensive for someone so young.

Oddly, Glamour failed to indicate which age group is permitted to carry the $12,000 Louis Vuitton Speedy bag pictured in “Sunny Day Chic” on page 144 (below). $12K for a bag to take to the beach, and they think Gossip Girl is unbelievable?

Allure: Catherine Zeta-Jones Has More Money Than You Do

Is Allure trying to make us hate Catherine Zeta-Jones? Reading “The Last Showgirl,” August, took our inchoate suspicions about the actress—she comes across as exceptionally high-maintenance, yes?—and magnified them. Naturally, there’s nothing outright derogatory in the profile other than the detail that the Zeta-Jones/Douglas décor includes a bronze statue of Atlas. (Just imagine the kind of apartment that must be.  Yikes!) But there are enough ambiguous moments in the interview that we have to wonder whether writer Brooke Hauser is trying to tell us something. Ah, subtext!

Catherine Zeta-Jones just happens to be good at being a movie star. It’s evident in the langourous way that she moves through a room, as if there were a trail of servants behind her, eager to peel her a grape.

Perhaps it’s because we don’t employ any domestic help, but we aren’t even sure what this means. How does a person behave as if a squadron of servants were tagging along? By barking out random orders? Leaving a trail of clothes on the floor? Even if you did have an actual team of assistants standing by (as CZJ surely does), it would be obnoxious to act as if you expected other people to do your bidding.

There’s a lot to glean from the bottles of Pellegrino, the housekeeper padding silently through the apartment, the shelves dedicated to heavy, leather-bound volumes of the couple’s past scripts, not to mention Michael’s two little gold men. “My Oscar’s in Bermuda”—the Douglases’ main residence—because “Bermuda’s never had one,” she quips.

A lot to glean, indeed! Gracious, those Bermudans must be so grateful that someone so magnificent deigns to keep a gold statuette within their borders! Do they give awards for condescension and self-aggrandizement? Because maybe she could keep those in Bermuda too!

Also, leather-bound scripts? Please. Like the repartee in Ocean’s Twelve was worth immortalizing.

Click-clack past the laundry closet, where she stops to roll her eyes and joke, “I’m constantly in there.”

Oh, another hilarious riposte! We know it’s a joke because ultra-glam movie stars would never stoop to doing their own laundry! How preposterous! They have servants for that! Ha! Hey, Catherine? We aren’t comedy experts or anything, but that remark is only funny to you because—wait for it—you don’t actually have to do your own wash. Outrageous privilege is, like, riotously funny!

And finally:

“I didn’t want to be another girlfriend of Michael Douglas,” she admits. “I remember feeling this immediate attraction and going, What are you going to do: Invest, like, a night or something? I didn’t want to put myself in that situation.” So, she did what any self-respecting woman in her situation would do: She tortured him. “Nine months without a touch or a kiss,” she says, with a light snort. “I’m sure he thought, Something’s not right with this chick. It usually doesn’t take me this long.”

At last, clear instructions for self-respecting women—simply string men along for months on end to make them appreciate you. Playing hard-to-get is the only way to make guys respect you, since you don’t have anything else to offer. Men do love a chase (and, apparently, being chaste)!

Presumably, this article is meant to be positive press (take note, Britney), and maybe CZJ is the kindest, most generous person in the world. We’ll never know her true nature for sure, but this article didn’t exactly have us signing up for membership in the Catherine Zeta-Jones fan club. But what do we know? We eat the peel on our grapes.

Allure Defends Nicole Richie With a Drug Reference

We found this amusing bit in Allure’s “Bottoms Up!” by Rory Evans, July.  Evans mentions gossip blogs, but we are quite sure we’re not reading the same ones.  These two sentences of hers actually made us laugh out loud.

If an actress gets too bony-assed, the paparazzi turn on her and so does public opinion.  (Could anyone imagine blogging smack about Audrey Hepburn the way they do about Nicole Richie?)

Because, you know, there isn’t a single gossip-worthy detail about Nicole Richie other than her weight.  But that surely unintentional reference to “smack”?  Genius!

Self Staffers: Fans of Medical Dramas, Vets, Resurrection

Shannan Rouss at Self has been watching Grey’s Anatomy with a lusty eye.  How else to explain this advice from March’s “Health Update”?

Super sexy M.D.s

What to do when your doc is hot

Maybe it’s just because we’ve never actually found ourselves in this situation, but we found the advice proffered to be a bit of a no-brainer.  Take a gander at  the caption accompanying a photo of Grey’s star Justin Chambers:

You can look, but avoid dating your hunky doctor.

Ordinarily, we’d never take advice (and especially patently obvious advice like this) based on the experiences of someone who doesn’t actually exist, but the more we mulled it over, the more we reconsidered.  We don’t even watch Grey’s—oh, all right, we watched the first season, but we did read all about the show’s recent ratings stunt plot twist.

Swooning over your physician is harmless, but if you have a thing for men in white coats, you might want to consider dating a vet.  It didn’t work for Meredith, but it could for you!

Know what else didn’t work for Meredith?  Dying.  She came back from the dead, people.  Clearly, we could learn a lot from this woman. 

Flashback: Britney's Bazaar Behavior

With all the bad news about Britney lately, we couldn’t help but feel a bit nostalgic for this:


Remember when that was what constituted a massive display of bad judgment on Britney’s part?

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.

Glamour: Resorting to Actual Models for Future Covers?

From Glamour’s January issue:  

Could you live without celebrities?

No Oscar dresses to critique, no front-page split-ups to gawk at...would this be good or bad?

Sounds good to us, Glamour, but then who would you put on the cover?

W: Can We Revert to "Seen and Not Heard"?

W has included a special section in the December issue called “W Junior.” It’s exactly what it sounds like, only more obnoxious. The section kicks off with “Say What?,” which delves into the previously unexplored (and for good reason) territory of the children of the fashionable. We dare you to read the intro—see if you don’t shiver in terror.

What happens when you take your two-year-old to too many fashion shows? She starts asking for carats, cocktails and couture—and critiquing your look.

Seriously terrifying stuff ensues, like this gem from Donna Karan’s three-year-old granddaughter, all of it written in a dripping “oh, aren’t they adorable?” tone:

“‘Why are you wearing flats? You should be wearing heels. You can walk in them. I’ll show you how,’” says Karan, mimicking the tiny fashion critic, who likes to slip into stilettos and show her grandmother how to strut like a runway model.

No one else sees a problem with a three-year-old preening down an imaginary runway?

Then there’s this darling quote from Lucy Sykes’s three-year-old, whose name is Heathcliff Rellie. No, really. That’s his name.  (Or maybe it’s Heathcliffe, as it’s spelled in the caption but not in the text.) The kid’s response to a sweater?

“Mummy, it’s so chic.”

And, really, it’s no wonder he said that, explains Sykes.

“I have been saying that since he was zero,” she says, giggling. “It’s just in our vocabulary.”

Dangerously precocious though these children may be, you can’t blame them for parroting their parents. Even so, we aren’t exactly chuckling at the idea of tots shouting “Credit card!” in the middle of Barney’s (as Jeremey Tahari, son of Elie and Rory, once did) and disabusing us of the notion that materialism develops later in life—like, say, as an unfortunate side effect of puberty.

Writer Amy Allen was also inspired by her child’s advanced sense of style. Her recently released book, This Little Piggy Went to Prada¸is a reworked collection of nursery rhymes, like “Hickory Dickory Dock, how big is Mummy’s rock?”

Yikes.

Perhaps we should  just consider ourselves fortunate to have received advance warning about the fashion insiders of tomorrow. We fear for the future, if only because a toddler who uses the word “chic” can’t possibly grow up to be even remotely tolerable.