Today's Women's Wear Daily reports on NY Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn's blog review of the ninety pound September Vogue and, as usual in these sorts of cases, WWD intimates that the comments following Horyn's post were the best thing about it. (Unless, of course, sentences like "Carolyn Burke's article about the friendship between Jacques Henri Lartigue and Richard Avedon was a surprise" get your juices flowing.) Here's commenter "Autre" on Vogue editor Anna Wintour:
I'm watching 'Psycho' after this - Hitch had the right idea about mothers, and other stuffed birds, there. Ya know, in the end, she was just like a stuffed bird, but the voice was still there. Well, as always, we hear the voice, but we need to see the stuffed (=inanimate) bird behind it. It's the powerlessness of the omnipresent voice. Or the fat issue - a lot of straw in there.
There's more!
One word SAYS IT ALL....STAGNATION! Imagine that on the cover: instead of the name Vogue, you'd see Stagnation.
A little further down:
Indeed, it has stagnated, in the most subservient way..."an old bitch gone in the teeth." Miller is as interesting as rain on a Tuesday in London; a prosaic choice to be sure. But what would it take to wake this slumbering mama up? What should the point of view be?
Sing it, sister! And from "Nadine":
Vogue magazine truly embodies all that is wrong in our culture while actually distorting all that is good-sycophancy and rampant cronyism abound while real talent is all but ignored. Unfortunately reading pop culture periodicals is work related but it gets very depressing.
Hey Nadine, it's okay, the Universe is just absurd like that. Anyway, these are so good we think we're going to have to scan some pages from the magazine and use them as captions. Developing!
Open Season[WWD]
Related: Big Mama: The New Vogue [NYTimes]