From Greg Enslen.com
Greg-arious Ramblings – 06/06/12
My wife Samantha and I are crazy for magazines—I always have a stack of tech and pop culture ‘zines sitting around waiting to be read: Entertainment Weekly, Wired, Popular Science, TV Guide, Writer’s Digest, and Popular Mechanics, to name a few. Of late, a few issues of Healthy Eating and Clean Living have snuck into the pile as I try to change some of my ways.
Mostly, the magazine covers feature superheroes, Apple products, movie stars, or futuristic moon bases, depending on the genre. The food-related ones invariably show a gorgeous closeup of some type of sugar-free tart.
Sam’s stack is different—it’s mostly fashion and home decorating. A couple of the covers jumped out at me recently: Vogue depicted three glowing, bathing-suit-clad Olympic athletes running arm-in-arm down a beach. And Harper’s Bazaar showed—get this—a woman walking down the street holding hands with a panda. Well, technically, a man in a panda suit.
I had to flip through to learn more. I say “flip through” instead of “read” because you don’t really read these magazines—there are articles, but the images outnumber the words 50 to 1. And while the magazines I looked at were ostensibly filled with photographs of “beautiful” women in “fashionable” outfits, I found many of them downright odd—strange hairdos, brick-like shoes, ghoulish makeup, funky alien hats. There were many other odd things.
The Odd, the Bad, and the Ugly
For example, Vogue (edited by the infamous Anna Wintour of The Devil Wears Prada fame) has a table of contents, but it was buried some 30 pages inside the book. Moreover, the articles listed in the TOC seemed to bear little relation to the articles within the magazine; and even less relation to the articles listed on the cover. This is supposed to be useful?
The ads were even odder. The very first page featured a Chanel ad with a woman sitting on the floor of a bar wearing some kind of headgear that hung down in front of her face. Top-of-mind-question: Is she attempting to communicate with her home planet? And page 41 displayed a full-page image of a naked man and a woman pouring Tom Ford cologne on one other. I guess nudity is allowed in magazines—as long as it’s in the name of fashion?
The editorial content itself was no less puzzling. The spread on Olympic athletes was odd: the athletes were shown variously in sweaty locker rooms, at the bottoms of pools, and sitting in basketball hoops. Is this meant to inspire a whole new generation of athletes?
Bazaar—or Bizarre?
The content in a Harper’s Bazaar I picked up was even weirder—they may want to change the name to “Harper’s Bizarre.” It started with the lady/panda date on the front cover and went downhill from there: the Fendi model on page 16 looks dead or dying, and women closely resembling aliens appear on pages 40-43, 52, 103, 122, 131, 208, 255, 273, and the entire article starting on page 398. What gives?
Closer investigation revealed that the panda story was photographed in China and was intended (apparently?) to celebrate the Year of the Panda. This spread has everything: Chinese lanterns; a ninja; a woman jutting one leg out of her dress like Angelina Jolie at the Oscars; kimonos and a waterfall; and, of course, an uber-skinny blond in a parade of avant-garde outfits.
This spread was followed by others yet more esoteric: vampires bleeding onto their fashion; shoes with feathers on them—lots of feathers; Kim Kardashian dressed as Cleopatra (doesn’t she get enough attention?); and an article on “patterns in fashion,” which included a woman wearing what I swear is an Indian blanket.
Burning Questions
Reading through these mags inspired a few final questions:
- Harper’s tagline is “beauty at any age.” So why does everyone in the book appear to be 18?
- A Levi’s ad in Harper’s noted that “hotness comes in all shapes and sizes.” So why are all the models in the books ridiculously, absurdly skinny? And furthermore, can I get one of them—any one of them—a sandwich?
- Why is the magazine 500 pages thick when it holds only 100 pages of content? If Wired had that ratio, I’d never buy it. Have fashion lovers, over time, developed a superhuman tolerance for commercialism?
- Finally, and, most importantly—can a $1,200 shoe from Celine actually be 300 times better than a $40 shoe from Target?
I’m all for showcasing new fashion and beautiful women, and both can be found in abundance in these magazines. I am uncomfortable seeing women used as props to sell dresses and shoes. Especially when women’s magazines often depict the female form in awkward, vulnerable, or sexualized positions–and with a much greater degree of nudity–than you find in men’s magazines such as Maxim or Esquire.
What do you think about how women are depicted in “women’s magazines?” Write me at info@gregenslen.com or visit my website at www.gregenslen.com.
Soon, I’ll tackle some other magazines from Sam’s stack of things-to-read: home decorating magazines. And by “home,” I mean “mansion.” And by “decorating,” I mean … well, you’ll find out soon enough.
