body issues
The obvious implication of putting Gisele and
Lebron James on the cover of
Vogue's "Shape issue" is that fashion is the female equivalent of sports. Well, no, scratch that, it's not so much the
implication as the explicit premise: "
Gisele Bundchen," the story explains, is "the Lebron James of fashion modeling." As
Vogue premises go, it's actually a fairly logical one. Modeling and athletics are the two fields wherein one can preposterous financial returns primarily on the basis of one's genes, and by genes I mean "bodies," and bodies are what the "shape" issue is about. Sure, the ideals are different: as Gisele points out, Lebron's foot is the size of her calf. In sports you have to work and train and psych yourself up and psych your opponents out and in modeling you basically have to deprive yourself of food and snort coke. But what's really so different about the two things? Since we all have to wear clothes, sports are arguably more pointless, unless you look at it as just sort of the "pornography" of warcraft — though don't we have videogames for that now? Whatev. It didn't
totally hit me until I saw the whole Annie Leibowitz-shot spread, which matches up models up athletes and supermodels.
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Jezebel
One of the things that gives us penis mag envy every time we hit the newsstands is the fact that they aren't afraid to search far and wide for people to whom to pose questions more existential than "Can u dispense a worthless platitude about finding a boyfriend suitable for 36-pt Helvetica pls?" Sometimes, of course, for all their efforts, magazines like GQ get…well…not much. Click the pic for some 
rag trade
