By now you've probably flipped through the fall fashion books, and made your way to a bikram yoga class to work out all the kinks in your back and shoulders that tend to afflict persons carrying an extra 21 pounds — because that's how much weight you were lugging around if you picked up the September issues of Allure thru W. (For what it's worth, it's lighter than last year's load.) The crowning jewel of the heavy mags was, of course, Vogue, whose 798 pages weighed in at a whopping 3.74 pounds. [Folio] It's just Anna Wintour's way of telling this year's runway models how much weight they have to lose if they plan on walking in this season's shows.
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Call it exploitation, post-colonialism, or poor marketing, but the image seen here is actually part of a high-end fashion spread. The editorial layout, which features a toothless gent identified only as "man" who holds a $200 Burberry umbrella, is part of Vogue India's attempt to capitalize on the nation's growing middle class.
The mag's August issue featured not models, but "average" citizens, all unnamed, holding designer bags and couture items. Yes: Poor people wearing items they couldn't afford with the sale of both kidneys.
Generally, we'd applaud the use of non-models in a fashion book. But we usually reserve our "thanks for not using anorexic models" applause for those who don't substitute them with "skinny because of malnourishment" persons.
Most Indians survive well below the poverty line on less than $1.25 a day, giving this whole spread a very disturbing Derelicte-Zoolander vibe. But it's the way Vogue India is using its models — Look! Silly poor people! — to appeal to the middle class (that thi that's supposed to help get rid of the caste system) that's so offensive. CONTINUED »
Kate Moss, the supermodel with a sordid history and a gold statue of herself on display in a British museum, has hit upon a novel idea and she wants to share it with the world. As it turns out, being a professional model is not the best diet plan in the world, "You go to a show and there's no food at all … I remember standing up in the bath one day and … I was so thin! I was never anorexic … I remember thinking, I don't want to be this skinny."
Not to knock the idea that fashion runways and the modeling industry create unrealistic body-image expectations for young women, but Kate is picking an interesting time (two weeks before New York's Fashion Week, which kicks off the global event) and place (Andy Warhol's magazine) to drop this truth bomb on the world.
Kate's clothing line Topshop is on the brink of a lucrative deal in China, and all of a sudden the formerly mum model gets all chatty with Vogue and Interview about eating disorders? If she really wanted to do something about the pressure models face about their body image, she'd put a sandwich where her mouth is and move up a cup size or two.
It's always an exercise in amusement to look at media from the past and think how gullible we were back then. Believing cigarettes made us look cool? Bless hindsight! Enter this article from the August 1931 issued of Modern Mechanics, showcasing a "beauty machine" that promises to keep a woman's figure in vogue without exercise — exercise, which had that unfortunate side effect of developing muscle mass on a lady's body! Reads the copy:
FASHION moguls have decreed that the boyish figure is passe, and that graceful curves are to be the coming mode. So, anticipating a need among the women, a far-sighted inventor has devised an instrument which literally rolls these curves into the body, getting rid of excess flesh without developing unsightly bundles of muscles, which exercising gave.
An important feature of the new device, however, is that developing these curves requires no work, for milady can become stylish in this new machine while reading a book, smoking a cigarette, or even gossiping. Hips, the chief point of attack, are reduced by means of rollers which massage the flesh, as illustrated in the accompanying photo.
Looking back, it's a wonder anybody could actually believe such a claim. Right?
Surprising, then, to find some 77 years later and buried somewhere in the 798 pages of September Vogue, the exact same ploy: CONTINUED »
Heterosexual clotheshorse, professional hockey player, and former Vogue intern Sean Avery is cashing in on his sartorial notoriety: He's the newest face of Gap, alongside photogs Ryan McGinley and blogtographer-cum-Esquire lens Scott Schuman.
Way to look out for your own, Wintour.
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No stranger to photographing youthful actors without any clothes on, Annie Leibovitz hits September's Vogue with a nude Daniel Radcliffe.
The Harry Potter star is, thankfully, a legal 19-years-old, compared to scandal-plagued Miley Cyrus' 15. Blame Radcliffe's upcoming Broadway turn in Equus for Leibovitz's turn with bestiality themes.
And for resurrecting an old favorite: CONTINUED »
Last night's The Hills wasn't the only "reality" show that's begging our attention. So too is Vogue's non-reality web series, which debuted its first episode after spending last month wrapped in hype.
On model reality shows, the first episode is where you meet the characters that you're going to love, hate, and want to be over the course of the series. So let's meet the narcissistic talent, shall we? CONTINUED »
New Yorkers with $10k to blow for VIP tickets (or $250 cheap seats for lowly wage slaves) are invited to a Sept. 9 Barack Obama event. It is the launch party at Charles Nolan studio for something called "Runway to Change with Special Guests Sarah Jessica Parker & Ann Wintour." Yes, Ann Wintour — that's how it went out to campaign supporters. Organizers, clearly, screwed up the Vogue editor's name, and we know no worse a crime. Especially when the woman is raising $100-$200k for ya and puts you on one of her magazines. "It was either a typo or the extra syllable would have thrown off the haiku we were going for," joked Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan. Yeah? Then explain misspelling the names of both New York Gov. David Paterson and actress Scarlett Johansson.
Hockey player Sean Avery, who made a name for himself by personally pleading with Anna Wintour for a Vogue internship, and then taking his shirt of in Men's Vogue to write about it, looks like he might be trading teams. Yes, he'll still be inventing rules for the New York Rangers, but what's this about his schmoozing up to Marie Claire? CONTINUED »
So, about that all-black issue of Italian Vogue: If you landed yourself a copy, you're one of the lucky few. "Even in New York City the few newsstands that carry the issue were sold out (one newsstand went through 400 copies) within hours. There were waiting lists and prepaid orders. Many of the customers, according to newsstand staffers I talked to bought all four-cover versions as keepsakes. At $16 a copy (one newsstand wanted to charge me $20 to prepay for his next batch expected in) it was a Circulation Directors' fantasy come true." One of our own editors is bidding on eBay for her copy.
But while the issue may have featured all black models, the magazine's publisher obviously didn't have enough time to have the ad pages reflect the editorial. Because next to the fashion spreads of Lily Taylor and Alek Wek, beauty products and designer labels were being plugged by a bunch of white girls. CONTINUED »
Just imagine what Miley Cyrus could've done for Vanity Fair's September issue. After all, the racy pics of the 15-year-old shining beacon of the American economy in the June issue have landed Graydon Carter his best-selling issue of the year. A very respectable 435,000 units moved on the newsstand. And she wasn't even on the cover.
With the numbers in hand, we can finally analyze what this issue became: An exercise in publicity.
It's likely Carter and photographer Annie Liebowitz didn't know they were sitting on circulation gold; they just thought they had secured pop culture's biggest rising star for a photo spread in the well. Instead, once the photos hit, they were met with cries of exploitation, which forced the Cyrus camp to claim the girl was taken advantage of, while Carter and Liebowitz stood by their decision.
When it came to media coverage, the story wasn't just relegated to insider media coverage — there was the celebrity factor too, which meant Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood were weighing in, splashing the magazine's cover (of Bobby Kennedy) and the Cyrus pictures in an endless loop of free VF advertising. The magazine racked up countless millions of image exposures — as 915 letters and a 20X traffic spike on the website — and left the confines of anything Conde Nast publicity could control.
And when it comes to the numbers, it was to their benefit.
But not every magazine can capitalize on continuous drum beating about a controversy inside their pages. And that includes a Conde Nast cousin. CONTINUED »
What magazine isn't getting into the reality TV business? Well, not Vogue! Except they are. They've got a new web series out next month — the annoyingly punctuated Model.Live — that'll track three models as they run from casting calls to runway shows in eight-minute webisodes. Naturally, because this is Vogue doing it, the project is the most expensive of its kind. With a budget of $3 million, the show costs about $31,000 a minute. But fret not! There is sponsorship attached. Express paid a low seven-figure fee to take part, somehow convinced that stocking its clothes in the closets of the models will produce a decent ROI. (It won't. At least not without additional integrations.)
It's Vogue's "at last" foray into the reality segment, because editor Anna Wintour, one who hates the word "blog," passed when Project Runway came calling (you know, in the days before it started charging magazines seven figures to take part). So why this web project? Because everything else that came their way was "not reality at all, just amateurs live," insists Vogue's Tom Florio.
Hah. CONTINUED »
Later this fall, when the sales data for Vogue's September issue is available, we might all have a good laugh about how terrible it did on the newsstand because Anna Wintour put Keira Knightley on the cover, even though when she appeared on the magazine last June, it was among the year's worst-sellers (405k newsstand). To be fair, Knightley was seen dressing an elephant in Louis Vuitton.
Or, you know, it doesn't matter who fashion books put on their September covers, because the sheer weight and thickness of that month's issues — the annual workout regimen of the fashion set — is the real draw. [WWD]
Remember that Vogue-King Kong controversy that ambushed the media chattering classes back in March? Anna Wintour and Annie Leibovitz were gouged by politically correct knives for repeating a racist and stereotypical image of King Kong and a lady of liberty, making cover star LeBron James look like a screaming ape next to a helpless (though smiling!) Gisele Bundchen. Now that the dust has settled, it's time to look at how Americans at large viewed the issue. In a word, poorly. CONTINUED »
Sunday marked the twentieth year that Anna Wintour has been editing Vogue. Ex-staffer Robin Givhan sent up her former boss, reporting said the editrix was celebrating the milestone "by doing . . . nothing."
Twenty years atop a magazine is an astonishing feat by itself; that Wintour, seen here in 1988 and 1989, has spent it running Vogue, the fashion bible, is even more impressive. And while she's weathered more than one scandal, plenty of nasty gossip column items, and the refusal to acknowledge the word "blog," there's one thing that, in two decades, hasn't changed. And the photo pictorial to prove it is below. CONTINUED »
Just in time to plug her New Orleans memoir The House on First Street, Vogue political scribe Julia Reed has a nasty anecdote to share about Hillary Clinton's former campaign manager Howard Wolfson, who she describes as "the most charmless human being on the planet."
As you'll recall, Vogue tried penning a feature on Hillary, only to have her campaign cut off access; Anna Wintour wrote all about it in a February editor's letter after Reed wasted plenty of time "sitting there sucking up to" Wolfson trying to work something out. Wolfson's excuse to yanking his candidate? "We already have the women's vote in the bag," he told Reed. "We thought we were going to be in a bigger dogfight. We don't need you anymore." The rest, of course, is history.
Surprise, surprise: Barack Obama was one of Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani’s inspirations when she decided to dedicate July’s issue of her magazine to black models. Of course, he wasn’t the only inspiration. Sozzani was well aware of the problem of the rapidly-disappearing black model.
Some sort of congratulations is in order for Sean Avery, the professional hockey player so obsessed with clothing he agreed to endure a summer making photocopies for Anna Wintour. (Actually, he asked her.) Somehow, in all the excitement about July's Nicole Kidman cover, we didn't realize that Avery had already wrapped up his internship at Vogue. So now that he's done at the magazine — though he hopes he'll be asked back next year — what does Avery plan on doing? Hitting the beach, "bringing the European flavor back to America, and I'm rocking a straight Speedo all summer." God bless you Vogue.
Because nobody else will. The designer's ad campaign with fembot Victoria Beckham was praised, by Vogue, as being "brave" for allowing Ms. Beckham, somebody so controlling of her image, to step into a giant shopping bag while being photographed. Eh, says the Daily Mail's Liz Jones: "Hmmm. To me, these pictures sum up exactly what is so very wrong about 'high' fashion. A small group of people - stylists, photographers, hairdressers, make-up artists, designers - are, I've come to the conclusion, having a great deal of fun, and making a great deal of money at our expense. These people do a very skilled and persuasive job: they bully us into buying more stuff."
The July issue of Vogue contains a 16-page photo spread featuring a pre-baby bump Nicole Kidman on the set of her newest movie, Australia. I’m OK with every shot except for the one with the animals, because I have odd irrational fears of random things, and I have now added those creatures to the list.
Editorial Director
