Arts
Why Vogue Continues to Disappoint Me
I only lasted 10 months because my smart coworkers were perpetuating the narrowest feminine ideal.
R. J. Cutler’s documentary The September Issue, opening nationwide tonight, is only the latest manifestation of America’s ongoing fascination—and dissatisfaction—with Vogue. In 1950 Mary McCarthy called it out on its aristocratic condescension. Gay Talese once wrote that the women of Vogue “speak in italics and swear in French.” Fast-forward to 2003 to The Devil Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger’s bestselling roman à clef about her former boss, current Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. Steady mockery from Gawker.com and the 2006 release of the movie version of Prada only fanned the flames.
The problem with these critiques is that they treat Vogue like any other women’s magazine, attacking it mainly for frivolity. But Vogue is not just another women’s magazine—it would never have attracted this much attention if it were. Vogue has a history and a cultural weight that make it impossible to dismiss, and it has always had more serious ambitions than its rivals. It was one of the first magazines to publish photographs of concentration camp victims, taken by Lee Miller at Buchenwald in 1945 and printed under the headline, “Believe It!” This is the magazine that in 1972 ran a dialogue between Kathleen Tynan and Germaine Greer in which Greer states, “Women have no property because nearly everything in their houses belongs to their husbands.” It has profiled the female presidents of Chile and Liberia, female media moguls in India, and, in August, Google executive Marissa Mayer.
All of these stories seem chosen to attract a thinking reader, and the fashion spreads themselves are often provocative as well as beautiful. See this month’s revised vision of the Red Riding Hood fable, Red’s gray coif challenging our sense of her as the child victim. What do we make of the wolf palming an apple as he accosts her? Is he about to offer it as a lure, à la the Edenic serpent, or is this Adam about to proffer the forbidden fruit to Eve, reversing that fateful setup that women have yet to live down?
A better way to critique Vogue is on its own terms, on how well it fulfills the dual mission it has set for itself: covering both surface and substance. Then we get a clearer sense of where it has failed.
In many ways the feminine ideal Vogue exalts today is even narrower than the confining one Betty Friedan criticized women’s magazines for promoting in the early '60s, an image of the fulfilled woman as “young and frivolous, almost childlike. ... In the magazine image women do no work except housework and work to keep their bodies beautiful and to get and keep a man.” To Vogue’s credit, it has never been very much about getting a man—maybe it assumes that’s no challenge for its readers. Unlike the magazines Friedan wrote about, it also has never celebrated the hausfrau. Instead, it continues to exalt women who have no career inside or outside the home.
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Comments
Vogue has a history and a
By: deff_lepp | Sun, 11/29/2009 - 02:12
Vogue has a history and a cultural weight that make it impossible to dismiss, and it has always had more serious ambitions than its rivals.We know much about this magazine dont we ?
Voucher Codes
Wintour
By: prismtrail | Fri, 09/18/2009 - 17:24
The September Issue surprised the hell out of me. It is a fascinating documentary which allows Wintour and Coddington to speak for themselves. It also confirmed for me again what I often think when I'm given a glimpse into almost any aspect of the fashion industry--what a horrible business! I love the fantasy of fashion and the entertainment of fashion as much as anyone else does. I love great photography and art, and even, on occasion, the frivolity of artifice. But to be trapped in it as a money-making proposition would be a life of torture!
It's true that Cutler did not ridicule his subjects, but I was delighted that he allowed Wintour the exposure of her own demons. The irony of Wintour's opening statement in the film--she believes that people who put fashion down are simply jealous about being the 'outsiders'--is priceless! Her admissions about her family's attitudes toward her career as being frivolous-- are so poignant and telling. And her own daughter's dismissal of the business as 'silly'--I LOVED it. They know what they are, and they don't care. It's all smoke and mirrors, albeit often desperately so.
The fashion industry is about what all industry is about in a capitalist economy: profit. If we don't buy into it, it will die. But that's not going to happen. Now, more than ever, we grasp for the fantasy.
Double sigh
By: mbg | Mon, 09/14/2009 - 18:39
I've subscribed to Vogue for about 20 years now precisely because I occasionally NEED nice relaxing entertaining fluff. Vogue used to be this for me.
And...they sometimes have interesting articles...well worth reading.
But now I find myself mostly irritated. Its a good thing it's cheap or else I would be unlikely to renew my subscription. For the last several years, the fashion pages have been boring. The models look like clones, the clothes are often unremarkable, boring or laughable. And this insistence on celabrating vapid celebrities? Who cares?!? They are SO boring.
Sigh.
By: sarahlizp | Mon, 09/14/2009 - 08:50
I never understood the kind of woman who seriously, like really seriously believed womens self of sense to be so fragile as to be destroyed by a few hundred glossy pages of fluffy content and pretty clothes. There are a few women who will look at a spread in Vogue and think, "I must be as skinny as this coltish, underfed and highly stylized adolescent girl or I will be less than worthless! I will be a failure if I don't live up to this standard!" but these women have problems that began long before they ever picked up a magazine. I and my friends, all educated women with, yes, real jobs and an array of real bodies and a never ending list of real problems, read Vogue (and Elle and Marie Claire and, yes, People) because it's a fantasy. For a half hour we'd like to pretend we have nothing better to do than throw photogenic garden parties and fret about finding the perfect frock. It's fun! It's a nice daydream! Then we put down the magazine, sigh, and go back to our spreadsheets, our elusive promotions, our husbands, our children, the piles of laundry and stresses about money, our chaotic and dirty and smelly and fulfilling lives. Perhaps with a firm resolve to check out zappos later to see if they have reasonable knock-offs of those prada t-straps. It's no more or less serious than that.
I've always been baffled by this womens studies hostility towards what has always seemed to me to be perfectly entertaining fluff. And full disclosure- I was a womens studies minor a million years ago. The arguments, the vehement, impassioned arguments always seemed to miss the point. I have never seen a tag on the cover of Vogue where it claims to represent the full spectrum of womens lives. It doesn't. It's a tiny, prettified and bawlderized slice of a lifestyle that very few women can afford. That doesn't make it bad, ladies. Most women, I think, actually do have the intellectual capability to distinguish between fantasy and reality. So stop taking it so seriously!
-sp
Vogue
By: DeeWNY | Sun, 09/13/2009 - 13:22
Do real women even read Vogue any more?
I mean real women with jobs, normal bodies and normal incomes. You know, attorneys, teachers, doctors, stay at home moms, accountants, retail wokers, waitresses, senators - people who ARE someone and spend their time and money on things other than handbags, makeup and shoes. Real women.
Wwell why do women buy these
By: buggie | Sat, 09/12/2009 - 23:32
Wwell why do women buy these magazines? They wouldn't exist if people didn't buy them. I'm pretty sure all women's magazines are absolutely horrible, full of contradictions, and published for the sole purpose of making women feel like failures so they'll keep buying more issues to find out how to fix themselves. I remember as a little kid how my mother and grandmother were always reading "Women's Day." There was always a photo of the most decadent chocolate cake on earth on the cover, right next to a headline like, "lose weight in three easy steps." And my mother and grandmother themselves seemed to reflect the covers like mirror. They'd oo and ah about sweets and then sigh, "oh it's so bad, I'm supposed to be on a diet." For my fifteenth birthday a family friend gave me a subscription to YM (is that still around?). It always frustrated me so much- there was never anything I could relate to. I wasn't interested in prom dresses, and I liked boys but we didn't "date" in the traditional sense at my high school, and I wasn't obsessed with it. I kept reading articles about anorexia and then flipping the page and seeing the headline, "look bikini perfect by summer!" I remember they called to get me to renew my subscription and I said, "no, I don't want to renew my subscription." and the woman said, "oh can I ask why that is?" and I said, "because it's crap" and hung up. I almost got sucked into Shape magazine in my early 20s, but I figured out pretty quickly it's not about fitness at all. It's about how to force yourself to drink a glass a water instead of eating when you're hungry. I was recently waiting for a long time at the pharmacy, and I saw a Cosmo with the headline "the ONE thing you can do to make him fall for you on the first date." Well I was curious to see what they said, so I found the article- it wasn't ONE thing, it was six things, and it wasn't what to do, but what NOT to do. It was written by a male "dating expert." It literally told women not to tell any stories on date, because what women's stories are not interesting to men. It also said never to bring up your work on a date, because even if you're not complaining, coming from a woman, it sounds like complaining. It said never to wear a dress or flats on a date, because even if you think you look cute in a dress, a guy always, always wants you to wear tight jeans and heels. None of this is an exaggeration of the article or my take on it, it was quite literally. I was really, really sorry I flipped through that magazine, because it was like a year ago and I'm still kind of pissed. SOOOO....this is all why the only magazines I EVER read are the Economist, Scientific American, and National Geographic.
A nuanced essay
By: EmilyHaHa | Sat, 09/12/2009 - 20:47
I was expecting a diatribe against the failings of Vogue and its inhabitants by the author. You know, the usual: everybody's so vain, it's all run by the witchy Wintour, etc. Instead, I think her conflicted essay gets at our own conflictedness as women who read magazines designed (supposedly) just for us. We can rail all day against how "the media" is making girls anorexic or fat or obsessed with their looks or whatever. But the reality is, we're still buying these same periodicals in droves (although not as much as we used to) and therefore perpetuating the very thing we claim to abhor.
I finally let my Vogue subscription lapse this year. Not because of the vapidity of some of the socialite-lite pages withing, but rather because I was sick and tired of seeing the same celebrities and actresses on the cover and hearing their cookie-cutter stories about being "just a regular ol' gal." If I wanted to hear about that, I'd listen to myself talking out loud.
V(a)gue
By: boredwell | Sat, 09/12/2009 - 14:44
VOGUE is an investment for those who enjoy dreaming; escaping the banal, mundane quotidian. The magazine has existed this long because it fascinates "readers." VOGUE's pages are a circus of daring and demure designs, lush photos fat with color with counterpoints in B&W. And, yes, it insists upon displaying its version of pulchritude, a parsimony of flesh of a variety mostly unattainable and often vapid, even intrinsically brittle and intransigently charmless. VOGUE is a trajectory; it's mission to fascinate and fuel dreams, to provide distraction from the dun and dreary demands of less refined but probably more sincere existences. It's riot and revelation, lugubrious and maudlin, fact and fiction, insipid and inspiring. Take you pick. VOGUE remains a recreational vehicle loaded with all the accoutrement. It will never deign to bow to carping iconoclasts.
Fur is dead
By: teacosy | Sat, 09/12/2009 - 10:49
Any magazine that continues to tout fur as a fashion accessory is a disappointment. Animals are killed with poison or electrocuted, there is no beauty in the production of fur.
Fur is dead
By: teacosy | Sat, 09/12/2009 - 10:49
Any magazine that continues to tout fur as a fashion accessory is a disappointment. Animals are killed with poison or electrocuted, there is no beauty in the production of fur.