Showing posts with label womens magazines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label womens magazines. Show all posts

Saturday, October 23, 2010

WHAT'S NEW IN ELLE AND VOGUE

My local library just gave away a bunch of magazines, among them some Elles and some Vogues. I took home some samples which I'll share with you. It's pretty weird stuff.

How do you like this cover (above)? I haven't read the article which explains it, but it appears to be about Drew Barrymore who has just fallen into a pool in her new bondage evening gown. She managed to pull herself out just as a gunman came along and announced that he's going to shoot her. Wow! Heavy stuff!

Vogue ran a "Daring Evening" article (above). Boy, it's daring alright! Let's see...a cheetah bra with thick satin drapery pants, and gold ultra-heel snakeskin shoes wrapped in white velvet ribbon.  Wow! I wish I could have seen the Lucy Ricardo moment when she brought it home and showed it to her husband.

Photos like this always come with quotes. They're surprisingly deep. Does the magazine hire philosophers?

Here's (above) a "Daring Duo." It's a super thin, skin-tight body stocking with a breast-eradicating bra and chattering teeth necklace. Add to that jewel-studded raspy pantaloons and black peek-a-boo heels.  Less than $4,000 before tax. A steal!

Wait a minute, the article doesn't tell us what the handbag costs. It's a tiny thing, so maybe they throw it in for free.

  Most handbags in the ads (above) are enormous. I guess a woman needs a big handbag to set off her feathered crotch.

Here's (above) another picture associating handbags with crotches.  The signifigance of this will probably hit me when I'm walking down the street a month from now, but right now I haven't got a clue.  Boy, women are hard to figure out!



A lot of the pages in Elle and Vogue are devoted to ads. Here's an ad for Bed Head Foxy Curls. It takes five Foxy Curl products to get that zombie look. You've got your Foxy shampoo and "moisturelicious" conditioner, your "extreme" mousse, your Foxy contour  cream (whatever that is), and your Foxy hair spray.

Bare skin abounds in women's magazines, but the gay men in the ads never seem to be turned on by it. This guy (above) is positively repulsed by the idea that his girlfriend took her blouse off.  His whole day has been ruined, you can tell.

By the way, the guy is wearing black lipstick and has slicked-down fascist future hair. Is that what lies ahead for men?

Haw! Cartoon Steve (http://cartoonsteve.weebly.com/)  sent me this picture of me ogling the Calvin Klein girl. Thanks Steve! I hope I get a modeling job out of it!

Friday, March 27, 2009

THE IMMENSELY INFLUENTIAL ALEXEY BRODOVITCH


Surely one of the most influential of all American artists was Russian emigre Alexey Brodovitch, the art director of Harper's Bazaar magazine from 1934 to 1958. It's hard to exagerrate what he did during those years. He transformed an ordinary womens magazine into an avante-garde art magazine that managed to sell clothes at the same time it was transforming the country's way of seeing the world.



Actually Harper's is still out there on the stands, but as you can see (above) it's a pale shadow of what it once was. 



I'm amazed that Brodovitch managed to sell so many middle-class women on something as weird as surrealism. 



I'd be amazed if the art magazines of the day offered the same value for the artsy dollar as Harper's and its imitators (above). 



Some of the best photographers of the day worked for Brodovitsch: Brassai, Henri-Cartier Bresson, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, just to name a few. 



You could have framed the covers. 



In case you don't recognize the name Richard Avedon, that's his work above. The leaping girl holding the umbrella at the end off this piece was Avedon's too. Harper's was full of pictures like these and only cost 45 cents in 1947.



Can you believe this (above) was on the cover of a mainstream magazine? Women were reading this stuff when their husbands were reading "Field & Stream."



High fashion magazines were criticized for their use of cold, souless models. No doubt that harmed the women who were dumb enough to try to imitate that cold model lifestyle in real life, but what about all the other women? For them these magazines increased their awareness of art, of all things graphic, of style and sophistication.



A number of old covers like the one above and the Vogue cover higher up, contained... I don't know what else to call it...an element of evil.  The women on the covers look like they're staring out at the reader from a room in Hell. It's weird. I can't figure out what that means.



I wonder if Brodovitch and Harper's were unwitting catalysts of the feminist movement. Women who read these magazines over a period of years must have developed a more artsy attitude about life than their husbands, and that was bound to cause a disconnect somewhere down the line. Even today you see more women in art museums than men.  

Mens magazines like Playboy tried to catch up by wedding naked pictures to essays and sophisticated stories, but that effort, admirable and flamboyant as it was, wasn't exactly comparable to what Harper's achieved. Harper's was actually in the forefront of the art world. For about fifteen years Harper's readers actually got to participate in a real, high-quality, cutting-edge art movement. It must have been exciting! It may have changed a generation of women. 

Playboy was actually the true successor to Harper's, and it succeeded in its turn in influencing a whole generation of men. I don't know of any magazine that does that now.