Hey guys, remember the success of Vogue India? The publication that got called out in the NYT for using "local" models, i.e. homeless people living at the poverty level, to promote haute couture for a nation where fifty percent of the population lives off less than two dollars a day? And then the editor for the magazine was all like "Lighten up?"

Yeah, totally not one of the magazine industry's finer moments, but hey, every PR crash-and-burn has a silver lining. In this case it was to alert the public that just because it's cheaper and more lucrative to produce words in India, doesn't mean you should necessarily just move your entire operation over there without taking the local culture into account.

But apparently the lesson that Condé Nast learned from all this was "stop featuring poor people," because the corporation is going ahead with the first issue of GQ India, featuring not legions of nameless poor but Bollywood megastars.

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