Favourite Vogue Australia Covers

From top: Catherine McNeil (September 2010), Abbie Cornish (December 2009), Sasha Pivovarova (July 2008), Melissa George (October 2006), Daria Verbowy (November 2005), Tiiu Kuik (July 2004), Linda Vojtova (September 2003).

Alfie 2

Regarding my header picture, an extensive search of this amazing site reveals that the issue of Vogue Sienna Miller is reading doesn't in fact exist and in fact may have been created expressly for the purposes of the film...shame because it looks like an amazing cover. Of course, the text on the cover ("Be true to your lover") could be intended to be ironic in the context of the plot of the film.

"She looks like a delinquent 10 year old boy..."

..is what my girlfriend said when she saw this Emma Watson cover (Vogue UK December 2010). Couldn't agree more. She expressly forbade me from buying it but I haven't missed an issue since September 2006...

...no words...

Crush: Lucy Brook

Blogger and journalist from Brisbane, Lucy Brook has become a semi-regular contributor to one of my favourite blogs Girl with a Satchel. She is a writer of great talent, loves all the magazines, I love, and is stunningly beautiful to boot. I hope one day she graduates to a blog of her own!

Marie Claire Australia January 2011

My girlfriend recently started subscribing to Marie Claire (Australia). This is a strange publication. Between sunny and beachy editorials positively oozing with the imminence of an illicit sexual encounter, there are articles exposing such ghastly things as the scourge of human sex trafficking in Australia, unethical medical experimentation, etc. It doesn't represent my own fantasy of a fashion magazine (the decadence of Elle in its many international manifestations more closely approximates this), but its enduringly healthy circulation and readership in Australia means that it must be doing something for the hoi polloi.



Can't we give it up with Elle Macpherson already? This is the woman who famously said "I wouldn't read a book I hadn't written myself."

Alfie

Doesn't everyone love my new header picture?

It took me about three months to work out that this is Jude Law and Sienna Miller in What's it All About, Alfie? This is an otherwise execrable movie with the script quality and production values of a credit card commercial, which I switched off in the first five minutes when I borrowed it on DVD some years ago.

Had I persisted, clearly I would have been rewarded with the most fulsome and accurate rendering of my sexual fantasy life ever seen in the history of film. Clearly I will have to rent it again.

Surely there are other people out there for whom this scenario is just as distractingly erotic?

O Canada

So a recent opportunity saw me pick up a few stray issues of some Canadian publications - the internationally-available (and personally adored) ELLE, and the Canada-only FLARE.

O, O Canada. Thou hast missed the mark.

Nations have personalities - often informed by broad strokes and outdated stereotypes, but as I flipped through these shy-of-the-mark versions of what should be perfectly sumptuous glossies, I found myself slowly shaking my head. Was Canada REALLY the clueless, adorable, utilitarian-minded nation all the sketch comedy had suggested it was? Was there truly no tiny vein of hedonism, no nominal cache of decadence in the Canadian collective psyche?

The paper stock inside the ELLE cover was rough and thick, almost industrial. Any semblance of the rich, mirror-polished pages of US ELLE or the thin-but-slick oversized pages of UK ELLE was completely lost - this was almost a parody of the publication, as though some Canadian magazine-smith was re-creating the title from a distant memory and all the wrong ingredients. "I seem to remember there were photos," she'd say, "and possibly they were of women?"

The ads were low-rent, and for mundane items more at home on a Wal-Mart discount shelf than at a Fifth Avenue department store. I've always applauded ELLE for being upper-middle-couture; it doesn't get as lost in its escapism as VOGUE or the more independent off-format titles, but even the most populist issue of ELLE rests glamorously on a satin-clad bed of advertisements for unattainable baubles and apparel. It's an important substructure; this is a fashion magazine, after all, and if pedigree isn't on display, then delicious artifice quickly starts to taste like tawdry commercialism. I shouldn't feel advertised to, I should feel as though I'm being decadently exposed.

If you can remember back to your childhood, over at a friend's house and eating some homemade version of a popular commercial snack that someone's mom painstakingly (but misguidedly) engineered in her non-commercial kitchen, that's ELLE Canada. ELLE Canada is your friend's mom's homemade "Snickers Bars".

On to FLARE.

I have to start by saying that any positive bias for this issue is fully credited to my admitted Selma Blair crush; it's hard to completely discard any issue that grants me full-page photography of Ms. Blair, so adjust your expectations accordingly.

FLARE suffers from the same populist-plebeian aftertaste that ELLE Canada gives, the notion that this is a magazine for fashionistas whose ancestral DNA lies in the lumbermill and not at the boutique. The pages in this case suffer from that greatest of flaws: the too-cheap transparency that makes backside text bleed through onto lighter photoshoots. There's nothing so mood-breaking as a gorgeous, white-backed full bleed photo with the next page's title poking through in the negative space. It's like dipping a diamond in ketchup. While the content is more focused on lifestyle than fashion, there's nothing delectable, nothing decadent in these pages. It's answering the call for excess with "that'll do". And again, maybe that's the heart and soul of Canada - in which case the rational individual in me praises them for their sensibility and resistance to abhorrent commercialism. But the glossy junkie in me knows now to steer clear of the Great North.

An open letter to fashion magazines everywhere.

Dear fashion magazines of the world,

I worry about you sometimes. I worry that you're forgetting what matters, that you're losing touch with your heart and soul. Allow me to snap you back on track:

Remember that you are, at the core, a cleanly-bound stack of pristinely-laid out crystallized concepts of decadent glamour. Whether any given page is a full-bleed photo, an all-text article, or a modestly-formatted masthead, it's clear that it's been crafted with a painstaking eye for composition, balance, color depth... it's sexy by very deliberate design. The fonts aren't accidental. The white space is meticulously measured and apportioned out. In theory, if you're dropped on your spine, whatever page falls open will be a work of sensuous, luxurious art.

So given that you're a bonafide stack of sugar-gloss Mona Lisas, why oh why do some of you INSIST on skimping on the page stock you print on? I'm looking at you, W. And yes, I know you're not haute, but listen up Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Allure and InStyle. You can't sell art photography on Polaroid stock, and nobody wants to listen to Bach over a cell phone speaker. Medium matters as much as content - maybe more. There's no substitute for heavy, mirror-gloss stock. The way it looks, the way it feels, the dark subtle reflections of fingertips as they linger on it. The weight of it working against the tension of the plastic coating, causing the pages to gently and perfectly arc as they fall in some cosmic demonstration that would make Fibonacci proud.

It's about the experience, fashion magazines. If it weren't, you'd just be pixels on a screen, effortlessly loaded at the lowest cost possible at a million computers worldwide. There's a ritual involved, even when the reader isn't aware they're performing the steps - selecting and procuring the magazine from the bookstore, protecting it in transit until the moment when you can finally crack it open at the cafe, in the living room, on the park bench. There's a reason they tend to stack up under beds, in closets, under coffee tables. They're a little hard to part with. They're substantial, polished collections of decadent, synthetic zeitgeist, each one a precision-cut rectangular prism coolly overflowing with high-intensity wet-shiny commercial sex. Ever carry a stack of them? They're heavier than other books. That extra weight comes from all the decadence.

So if the experience of flipping through the magazines is central, core to the concept of the thing, then why, dear magazines, would you ever risk printing your pages on a stock so thin that the text of the article on page 168 is visible through the white gown of the model on 167? The illusion is broken; the Mona Lisa has gone from the Louvre to the poster store. Treat yourself, magazines. Treat yourself and us to thick, heavy pages covered in candy gloss. BE the treasures you are. Each advertisement a museum piece, every photoshoot a gallery candidate. Don't give me the rough, satin-sheen pages of W, or the translucent, barely-glossy sheets of InStyle. Show me the wet shine of ELLE, the silky, heavy panels of Vogue UK. Reward my fingers, my eyes, and even my nose for the trouble of the ritual.

Be worth it.

-C

Au Revoir, Green Grenadine!

One of my favourite bloggers, Green Grenadine, has ceased blogging: such a shame considering I started blogging again partially in order to keep her some cyber-company. Please check out her beautiful blog as she's keeping it alive for the next little while (hopefully she will change her mind...).