'Elle' Magazine: Now The Prettiest Girl On The Fashion Mag Block

I am an outrageously partial reader when it comes to Elle. Which, uh, sorta happens when the magazine was your first post-college professional experience. However I will say in all sincerity and honesty: The newly redesigned Elle? Absofuckinglutely gorgeous. Though small changes had been made to the magazine following the installation of new creative director Joe Zee back in February, this, the September issue, is the first to exhibit the full Zee effect. My conclusion? Divine. After the jump, learn more about what's changed... or rather, what's changed for the better. More »

'Elle' Magazine's Roberta Myers: Creative, Cautious, Constant

Compared to its fashion magazine cousins, Elle is one tough, slightly-feminist chick. One of the few women's titles unafraid of its own (or its readers') intelligence, Elle is overseen by one Roberta 'Robbie' Myers, who, unlike her editrix peers, is not much of a glamourpuss/press whore... mostly because she wants it that way. Lately, however, Myers has been in the news, due to a string of staff departures, a massive redesign, and, well, a curious choice of cover subjects. But what do we really know about her? Well, not much. After the jump, graphologist Sheila Kurtz finds that Ms. Myers — former boss/mentor to our own Jennifer Gerson — is as careful with her public persona as she is with the content in her magazine. More »

Obsessing About The 'Elle' Body Obsession Issue

We actually empathize - to the extent that we are capable of empathy - with fashion magazines' obsessions with body obsession. [You mean now that we have experienced firsthand the sick thrill of the pageview climb we get from POSTING WHAT YOU FUCKING ATE TODAY? -Ed.] For one thing, they sell! For another thing, they provide the only sort of content in women's magazines that actually make us feel really really viscerally deeply. Like those stories about Walter Reed or the Virginia Tech massacre, only actually so much worse:

"She'd let herself go, this girlfriend. She truly had. By our six-month anniversary, she cast a perfectly oval shadow and was aware enough of her condition to choose theater seats beside the aisle. This allowed our fellow moviegoers not to have to climb onto their seats when she went to refill her jumbo Cokes and empty what was, by then, her jumbo bladder."

Ugh. After the jump, more textual equivalents to clutching our love handles in our fists and eating a whole can of wintergreen Skoal because it's the only thing that will make us throw up. More »