Vogue, I Really Must Quit You.

I have been a faithful Vogue reader for years, since Alex helped me justify this habit to myself. Yes, Vogue, that bastion of capitalist pornography. But what can I say, I love high fashion. I've never been interested in the whiter teeth, thinner thighs, or the perfect manicure of Glamour nor have I looked to Cosmopolitan for better orgasms or the most uncomfortable thongs. Once upon a time, Vogue didn't preach to you; Ms. Wintour may have always hated fat people like the dickens but she would never stoop so low as to let the plebian masses in on her weightloss secrets because the magazine really should be about the almost criminal beauty of a Christian LaCroix (remember Noami Wolff's indictment of the French designer in The Beauty Myth?) dress that most readers can't afford anywho. And so maybe I can't afford ten thousand dollar dresses, but I can afford the five dollars every month to see a fantasy of chiffon and sequins perched on the highest heels imaginable. I love the unwearable fashions of haute couture, although I'll surely never wear them. And Vogue knows that there are many readers like me, who may never wear the clothes represented in their pages, but want to glimpse the beauty of the the clothes. While I don't believe that clothing is the ultimate expression of individuality, I do believe that clothing is densely coded with social signifiers, am fascinated by how clothing is both an architecture around the body, and how clothing can highlight the architecture of the body. In a funny way, the magazine is like a museum for clothing. Although in tone, the magazine is aimed at socialites, the income demographics of Vogue readers are actually lower than other fashion magazines like InStyle, which features very wearable, approachable looks for the extremely well-to-do woman. The loathsome term aspirationalism is used to describe the phenomenon whereby regular people buy magazines like Vogue, but this has always struck me as stupid marketing bullshit. So I've kept reading.......not because I aspire to anything, but because I love clothes the way I love paintings and poems.

But Anna Wintour has gone too far this time. Besides the incredibly racist cover of the April 'Shape' Issue, which featured James LeBron and Gisele basically posed as Godzilla and fair white kidnapee, respectively, the April issue contained a story about how Vogue called up the Rodarte designers, Laura and Kate Mulleavy and offered to help them lose weight. The magazine payed for the sisters to go on a diet that included a personal trainer and a chef. Laura and Kate Mulleavy have been producing eccentric, diaphonous gowns from the bedroom of their childhood home in Pasadena under the name 'Rodarte' for the past three years. Their meteoric rise to fame has been so satisfying mostly because they're soooo talented, but partly because they seem so humble and normal and secure enough in themselves that they didn't need to conform to the fashion industry's standard of thinness. I can't even wrap my head around how fucked up this is–as if the usual pressures of the fashion industry weren't alienating enough as a young and not-rail-thin designer, Anna Wintour calls you and explicitly tells you 'you must lose weight.' My jaw is still on the floor. Part of me wonders whether this has to do with the fact that Laura and Kate are young women so industry people like Wintour feel like they have the right to dictate something as personal as weight to these girls. I wonder if anyone would have dared to tell Karl Lagerfeld to lose weight in his larger years?