Shouting & Whispering

This is Adam's Moss' take on New York magazine covers. It's interesting that they feel like they can be more creative, since they don't rely on newsstand sales. I like that they're trying to experiment.

Fashion Magazines, Without the Makeup

Picture from Jezebel.com

European fashion magazines are better than their American counterparts because they're less focused on the star quality of their cover stars (every celebrity is promoting something) and more concerned with what they should be: fashion. And they're easily mockable, as Jezebel points out. The covers of European fashion magazines are more interesting, too. Take the concept of the main editorial in the April issue of French Elle: stars without makeup. Can you really imagine Anna Wintour approving of that editorial, nevertheless placing it on the cover?

Out of Sorts

During finals week last December, I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. At one point of the movie, Clementine says to Joel, "I'm all out of sorts." This made me giddy because I knew the true meaning behind the phrase, which I learned in Magazine Design class. So it turns out, back in the olden days, printers used metal sticks engraved with letters to print things with. Those metal sticks were called sorts. So if you were out of a certain letter, you'd say you were out of sorts. Hence the saying.

I Love You, Helvetica

In my Magazine Design class, we watched Helvetica, a documentary on said-font, and typography in the world today. In it, Massimo Vignelli, a typographer and designer who was behind the 1970s original New York City subway map and the American Airlines logo, said the following:

"You can say, 'I love you,' in Helvetica. And you can say it with Helvetica Extra Light if you want to be really fancy. Or you could say it with the Extra Bold if it's really intensive and passionate, you know, and it might work."

which made me smile a lot.

Vogue India, Pushing Fashion for the Unfortunate, Right?

Fashion editorials are usually stupid and unbelievable. Right, you're going to wear a $4,000 plain dress while hiking through the mountains of Patagonia, because it just makes so much sense. Vogue India takes that even further: putting $10,000 designer bags and $200 designer umbrellas in the hands of India's people. No, not models Vogue India dressed up to look Indian, but instead, the true people of India--the workers whose clothes are covered in dirt, the women missing teeth, etc.

The Vogue India editor, Priya Tanna, had this to say about the editorial (from the New York Times):

“Lighten up,” she said in a telephone interview. Vogue is about realizing the “power of fashion” she said, and the shoot was saying that “fashion is no longer a rich man’s privilege. Anyone can carry it off and make it look beautiful,” she said.

“You have to remember with fashion, you can’t take it that seriously,” Ms. Tanna said. “We weren’t trying to make a political statement or save the world,” she said.

Riiiiiight.

(Thanks, Ekyjot, for pointing out the article to me.)