Vogue -part 2
Ever since I saw the film ‘The September Issue’, I’ve wanted to pick up an issue of Vogue.
‘The September Issue’ is a documentary about putting together the September issue (duh!) of American Vogue. It’s like ‘The devil wears prada’ but impossibly more glamorous, cruel and wonderful and it left me thinking that with a few more perfectionists, the Earth would be a better place, or a smoking cinder.
Essentially the editor of the magazine has to try and crush the defiance of lots of creative people while simultaneously bringing out the very qualities that make them creative. The whole place is like a beehive – full of poison, manufacturing something sweet and everyone serving the queen.
Favourite scene? The model wolfing down a tart. I have no love for any woman who is an anodyne waif…but the second she attacked that jam tart with gusto…bloody ding dong, you’re telling me she’s beautiful and real too? (And has access to free food? I mean it’s free right, and she could bring it home and it’s not like she’s going to eat all of it.)
Deal time…when they launch the 1,000 page issue – I’ll buy it. If only because I want to see what the writing is like. If they can firehose money on photo shoots then they should emulate Playboy in terms of writing. If Mailer and Hemingway used to write for Playboy, why aren’t Amis, Ford and Coe write for Vogue.
What I particularly liked about the documentary was the obvious passion that everyone had for the subject. But let’s not think that this is isolated to the world of fashion. Among the many magazines at the news stand are modelling magazines, not magazines with models being skinny women but rather the models being 00 scale. That’s right ‘Model Village World’, the rest of us might think that it’s ridiculous but these people have a passion for documenting an unobtainable beauty, like a 1950s perfect chocolate box English village (complete with sleeping cats and sleeping murder) but it’s less furiously ridiculous than seven pages of a glossy magazine devoted to the snood. Scale modelling. Remove the ‘scale’ and is there any difference? Come to think of it is there any difference even if you leave in the ‘scale’ – the models in Vogue are size 0 (if not scale 00) and real women are, what, size 16?
In establishing the fashion model industry we have created a breed of people who would otherwise perish in the wild or have to serially shag Premiership footballers.
‘The September Issue’ is a documentary about putting together the September issue (duh!) of American Vogue. It’s like ‘The devil wears prada’ but impossibly more glamorous, cruel and wonderful and it left me thinking that with a few more perfectionists, the Earth would be a better place, or a smoking cinder.
Essentially the editor of the magazine has to try and crush the defiance of lots of creative people while simultaneously bringing out the very qualities that make them creative. The whole place is like a beehive – full of poison, manufacturing something sweet and everyone serving the queen.
Favourite scene? The model wolfing down a tart. I have no love for any woman who is an anodyne waif…but the second she attacked that jam tart with gusto…bloody ding dong, you’re telling me she’s beautiful and real too? (And has access to free food? I mean it’s free right, and she could bring it home and it’s not like she’s going to eat all of it.)
Deal time…when they launch the 1,000 page issue – I’ll buy it. If only because I want to see what the writing is like. If they can firehose money on photo shoots then they should emulate Playboy in terms of writing. If Mailer and Hemingway used to write for Playboy, why aren’t Amis, Ford and Coe write for Vogue.
What I particularly liked about the documentary was the obvious passion that everyone had for the subject. But let’s not think that this is isolated to the world of fashion. Among the many magazines at the news stand are modelling magazines, not magazines with models being skinny women but rather the models being 00 scale. That’s right ‘Model Village World’, the rest of us might think that it’s ridiculous but these people have a passion for documenting an unobtainable beauty, like a 1950s perfect chocolate box English village (complete with sleeping cats and sleeping murder) but it’s less furiously ridiculous than seven pages of a glossy magazine devoted to the snood. Scale modelling. Remove the ‘scale’ and is there any difference? Come to think of it is there any difference even if you leave in the ‘scale’ – the models in Vogue are size 0 (if not scale 00) and real women are, what, size 16?
In establishing the fashion model industry we have created a breed of people who would otherwise perish in the wild or have to serially shag Premiership footballers.
Labels: Magazines, Media, modelling, scale models, Vogue, Women, Writing
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