The magazine is Cosmopolitan, from that almost unrecognizable halcyon age of women's magazines when Mademoiselle was publishing Truman Capote's short fiction and Joan Didion was working at Vogue. (That story about "modern psychiatry," grandma's common sense, and the vexations of motherhood sounds kind of familiar, though.)

Meet Tippi "Hedrin"! The best part about this page is that she is holding a lobster.

Do you hear that? Hedren loves everything about modeling. Even the scratchy-looking "removable dickey" on that sheath dress.

By 1953, Hedren had already gotten her first film role, in The Petty Girl. The Birds would come ten years later — and after her divorce from Peter Griffith, pictured. (Apparently the love of animals was lifelong.)

See what you can do with a good wardrobe of stoles?

I just learned that Tippi Hedren was apparently partly responsible for Vietnamese immigrants to California taking up the manicurist trade. Hedren met some Vietnamese refugees in the mid 1970s, and they remarked upon her nails. "I noticed that these women were very good with their hands," Hedren told the Los Angeles Times. "I thought, why couldn't they learn how to do nails?" So she organized training for that particular group of women. Their relative success motivated others, and now California nail technicians are 80% Vietnamese. The more you know!

The Model Life [ModernMechanix]
A Mix Of Luck, Polish [LATimes]

• Freida Pinto looks fantastic on the March cover of Vogue India. [ONTD]

• Stella McCartney and Net-a-porter.com have announced the designer will produce a capsule summer collection exclusively for the e-tailer. [WWD]
• Coco Rocha posted an excerpt from her E! Canada show about New York fashion week to her blog. She goes on a fitting at Michael Kors, and then has an odd conversation with Heidi Klum about pole dancing. [OhSoCoco]
• Mad Men costume designer Janie Bryant shares a favorite designer with Edina Monsoon. She still can't talk about her potential namesake line, however. [The Cut]
• The rumor that Debra Messing and Cameron Diaz dumped Rachel Zoe as a stylist isn't true, say Debra Messing, Cameron Diaz, and Rachel Zoe. Phew. [People]
• Zoe also still styles Anne Hathaway, whose spectacular art deco-looking Oscars dress was Armani Privé. [USA Today]
• And everyone approved of Kate Winslet's Yves Saint Laurent — except, that is, for her daughter Mia, who objected to the fact that it was gray. [Yahoo! News]
• A coda to all this talk of hats coming back (or not) might be provided by an exhibition, curated by milliner Stephen Jones, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Called Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones, it was culled from over 7,000 hats in the museum's collection, including the hat Cecil Beaton made for Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, Darth Vader's mask, and, appropriately enough, a bonnet and a top hat from Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, respectively. [Style.com]
• Rodarte's response to the economic situation? Not making pants. "We don't sell our pants anyway," said Kate Mulleavy at a panel in Los Angeles — so as a cost-cutting measure, they didn't even design any for this fall. At the same event, Adriano Goldschmied, who does make pants — jeans that cost $200, to be precise — said in the downturn, luxury will return to its true, dreamy essence. "Even if [customers] can't afford it, at least you give them a dream. A dream, in my opinion, is the engine for our work." Of course, if dreaming is all your customers do, you're in trouble. [WWD]
• Former fashion editor Nonnie Moore died at 87 in Manhattan. Moore, who was the fashion director of Mademoiselle, Harper's Bazaar, and GQ during the 1970s and '80s, was an early promoter of Perry Ellis and Issey Miyake. [NY Times]
• Coach announced plans to cut 10% of its US corporate workforce. [WWD]
• All those 85% off sales over the winter were, unsurprisingly, harbingers of really bad quarterly results: Saks joins Nordstrom and other department stores in reporting sharp declines in sales for the quarter ended January 31. Same-store sales at Saks Fifth Avenue fell 15.3% in the period (in the fourth quarter of 07, same-store sales grew by 9%). All told, the retailer lost $98.75 million dollars during the quarter. [NY Times]
• Speaking of Nordstrom, it's making money — or at least stopping the losses — any way it can. Which includes sneaking up the finance rates on its store cards. And lowering its prices. I'd call that about a draw from the consumer's perspective. [WSJ]
• Someone who's expanding in this market is H&M. The fast fashion chain expects to open its first store in South Korea in the spring of 2010. [WWD]
• Could Tommy Hilfiger's new wife Dee Ocleppo be pregnant? [Page Six]

While I feared pat and tired "love your body" platitudes, I decided to read the book anyway. And just as Rachel said, it was full of humor and honesty and emotional depth, and it made me want to interview Frankel (who conveniently lives a ten minute walk from my apartment). The main reason Frankel decided to finally tackle what she calls her "dieting addiction" once and for all was because her two daughters, Maggie and Lucy, were reaching puberty. "It’s my goal to instill this happiness and comfort in my daughters’ skin so that they’re never distracted from their real goals with this shit," Frankel told me. "The decades I have lost on negative thoughts and negative behaviors with the self-loathing, it’s just a waste of time." More insight from Valerie on body image, lady mags, mothers and daughters below.

Jezebel: You worked at Mademoiselle and wrote about both positive and negative experiences you've had with women's magazines. At Jezebel we seem to love and hate women's magazines in equal measures, and I wonder if it's possible to consume that sort of media in a way that's not destructive.
Valerie Frankel: As awful as it was at the beginning (see Dodai's earlier post about the coked-out calorie counting), once the original editor who hired me left, working at Mademoiselle was really was awesome at the end. It was amazing and that’s why it probably didn’t last. I think of my daughters reading women's magazines, I try to teach them to be a little cynical about the way the material is presented, to be a little savvy about the relationship between editorial and advertising. And they learn that because of living with me and my having been in this business so long. That being said [my daughter] Maggie loves all of it. Teen Vogue and Seventeen, the number of teen titles is dwindling daily but she loves it all and wants it all. And she probably reads the way that most people read it, for the fashion and the beauty. She did say this one crazy thing she wanted to take swim lessons because she read in one of the teen magazines that guys consider girls who swim, 'hot.' This is why you want to take swim? She said it wasn’t, but it was part of the package. And in terms of my consuming women’s magazines, I’m sort of aged out of a large portion of them. I don’t read them for fashion and beauty. It’s going to sound dowdy and ridiculous but at this point I really do read them for the recipes.

Jezebel: In the book, you do an experiment where you count the number of negative thoughts you had about your body in a single day. I wanted to try that experiment before I met with you, but I was too scared.
Valerie Frankel: I started writing this book when I was 41, and now I’m 43, and I definitely felt like in the process of writing the book I had to reach a certain level of maturity to deal with this stuff. It was also having kids of a certain age and not wanting them to make the same mistakes, and I didn’t want to make the same mistakes my mother made [Frankel's mother criticized her weight endlessly].

Jezebel: I know you wrote a lot about being teased mercilessly about your weight in middle school, and I wonder if things are worse for girls your daughters' age because the ideal has become smaller and smaller since you were a tween.
Valerie Frankel: As the nation gets fatter, the ideal standard gets smaller, because it becomes that much more impossible to attain. There are the girls for whatever reason are the targets, and I still see that in my daughters' school. And it seems to be established pretty early, I was a target in the seventh grade, and it stuck, even regardless of what my weight was in any given year. I wrote about it in the book. My parents forced me to go on optifast, which is this experimental liquid protein diet, and I did lose weight. I was officially underweight, but I don’t think anyone ever saw me with any kind of perspective. I was still the target, the fat girl. There were fat girls at my school who became full-blown anorexics, like walking skeletons, scary ass shit. And they had been targets about being fat, and then when they lost all that weight they were targets for being skeletal and too thin. That’s just the way it was forever.

Jezebel: You talked earlier about having to reach a certain level of maturity before being able to work on your body image. How long did that process of purging the negativity take?
Valerie Frankel: The writing process was a full year, and it’s been a year since then. I would say I feel stronger all the time, and more conscious. You go in and out, and sometimes I feel like I’m losing control of it again, but then I wrest control back. Because I did a shitload of work. Emotional work, and my goals were emotional. Just reframing it that way. My goals were not about losing weight or running a certain distance, they were wholly emotional.

Jezebel: Sometimes I watch the Biggest Loser and it seems like with that show and most of the other weight loss shown in pop culture, it's all about image. They never address any of the emotional stuff.
Valerie Frankel I watch it too! They never focus on it on The Biggest Loser except for this one episode. Did you see the one, with Jillian’s mother who is a shrink? It was such a crazy episode. Jillian’s mother is a shrink who deals with eating issues and body image, and her mother came on and did little sessions, which of course were taped. And one guy went on and admitted that he had been abused sexually and physically and probably verbally, and hello! It was way too intense. They never did it again. My theory was to get to the root of everything about body image for me, and get square on that, and move forward. And I think it’s great and everyone should do it. It really works.

Jezebel: I have to be honest, when I first read about your book I thought it was just going to be another book about weight loss touting the same superficial "love yourself" message that is never helpful. I mean, obviously if just telling people to love themselves worked, the dieting industry would be out of business. But your book wasn't like that.
Valerie Frankel:There’s nothing about dieting in it. It’s not about food, it’s about body image. This is a true memoir, it’s not a real time memoir that are so popular now, like “my year of losing weight” or something. It’s about everything, the present and the past and melding the two. Just in terms of the writing of this book as a discovery process, I knew that body image had been a major theme of my life, but I was shocked when in the course of writing I discovered that it had influenced every major decision in my life. Marriages and career, and parenting, and just everything. I mean everything. Everything I wore, everything I did. Just everything. And that alone was such a shock, and made me want to live the rest of my life differently.

Jezebel: How did the thought process go?
Valerie Frankel: I went back for the earlier chapters, I took a deep breath and plunged into those painful things from my past. Despite the fact that I had been a writer for 25 years and have probably written millions of words, have never written about the mother stuff, or the junior high stuff. And it was interesting to hear the reaction of friends. They were all 'I can’t believe you were such a loser in junior high.' It was so this part of my past that I suppressed, and all the mother stuff. I mean, my old friends who were there, they knew. But my mother and I have such a close relationship despite this one area. It just seemed so weird, so many people were like, how can you even talk to her? But it’s complicated.

Jezebel: Mother daughter relationships always are.
Valerie Frankel:It made me think about my fiction too. A lot of the mother daughter relationships I’ve written about have kind of been one-dimensional because I hadn’t been able to deal with the anger part of it. I had to unlock it. I’m working on a novel now and I’m finding it much easier to go to those dark places. I had written comedy for so many years and I wondered, why? It also helped me get to those dark places that I had suppressed when my husband died [Frankel's first husband died of cancer in November 2000]. I don’t know if you have anyone close to you who died, but it’s very difficult to let yourself think in terms of anything being insincere about the relationship or the relationship having any flaws. It’s like as soon as somebody died, everything has to be wrapped in this sort of golden glow. I idealized that marriage for a long time because I couldn’t go there. Not just writing about, but thinking about, things I just had not allowed myself to deal with. And it was crazy, just typing and crying and everything built on itself.

Jezebel: Anytime we bring up issues of weight at Jezebel I read the comments from our readers and they're always so deeply sad. There is a lot of self-loathing there, and I just wish there is a way we could all — myself included — discuss these issues without being so hard on ourselves.
Valerie Frankel: I think in this culture it's impossible to not care about your weight. But you have to understand, one of the key themes in the book, and it was a major, light bulb moment for me, is that weight is a distraction from the real problems, and what really matters in your life. It’s a convenient distraction. It’s not going to go away. You think about your weight instead of your abusive boyfriend or your job that’s not going anywhere or that you don’t know what you want to do with your life. And I realized it through a lot of really bad times in my life, obsessing about weight was a way to not deal with other issues.

Jezebel: It sounds like it was almost a comfort for you.
Valerie Frankel: It is a comfort. I wasn’t an emotional eater, I was an emotional dieter. Like dieting itself was the addiction I thought that if I went cold turkey on dieting, I would just be lost in a store. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. And I think when all that stuff goes away, when you stop dieting and stop obsessing, you create an emotional vacuum and something has to rush into it. It can be positive things. I think you can strengthen your relationships or get somewhere in your career or write that novel or run the marathon or whatever your real goals are if you just stop obsessing about your weight. And you might gain five pounds, but you’ll have written a novel. My bad self-image hasn’t affected too much of the trajectory of my life overall, but I just would have been a lot happier for a long time. I would love it if my daughters' generation of girls weren't distracted from their goals by thinking about this shit. Just think of what you all can do if you don’t have this one thing.

Thin Is The New Happy [Amazon]
Valerie Frankel's Palace Of Love [Valerie Frankel Official Website]

Earlier: The Last Days Of Mademoiselle: Cocaine, Cigarettes & Calorie Counts

Now Valerie Frankel, a former editor at Mademoiselle, has a book called Thin Is The New Happy, in which she details her experiences at the magazine. What does she say about working at the glossy for smart young women? "I did more blow in my first two years at Mademoiselle than in college, when I lived with a coke dealer." Plus:

"Self-starvation was a competitive sport. At staff lunches, the girl who ate the least won," Frankel writes. "During downtime, we'd sit in our offices smoking cigarette after cigarette (to quell hunger) and talking about who ate what, the calorie counts of our lunches, the latest dieting trends, who on the staff looked heavy."

Oh, and by the way, Frankel had a sex column, in which she may or not have dispensed advice. While high. Coke psychology!

What I hate about stories like this is that it reinforces some shitty stereotypes, namely that women cannot work together without life being a living hell, especially in the magazine industry. But what I'm guessing is that things probably haven't changed that much. At the time, Mademoiselle was owned by Condé Nast. Frankel says human resources told new hires to "represent the magazine in [their] personal appearance," and the office motto of sorts was "get thin or die trying." Hence the "hillocks" of coke and the co-worker who carried a scale to weigh everything she ate. But even though Mademoiselle has folded, Condé Nast still owns and operates Vogue, W, Glamour, Allure, Self, Teen Vogue, Lucky, Brides and Modern Bride. What are the chances that those publications are being run by women involved in drugs and starvation?

Tales From ‘Mademoiselle’: ‘Self-Starvation Was a Competitive Sport’ [NY Mag]