Elle to Pay: Beauty and wisdom in Spain - Elle magazine

National Review, Dec 20, 1999 by Reid Buckley

FOR all the evident corruption in our manners and morals, we Americans cannot take pride of place.

This past summer, in Spain, I was impressed by the curious mixture of culture lag and cross-Atlantic cultural fertilization when my wife brought home a copy of the flossy women's magazine called Elle.

Elle is a fashion mag-with-a-message, a Gallic/Hispanic mirror of Cosmopolitan. The August 1999 issue features on the cover fetchingly blonde, blue-eyed, fuchsia-lipped Daniela Pestova, who stares seductively at the reader in a Jill Stuart bib dress (it resembles the top of a pair of blue jeans cut from semitransparent material) that exposes the hang and volume of Mlle Pestova's upper-right breast (which, along with its mate, will soon sag to her navel if she continues donning such outfits). She epitomizes the new "Lipstick Woman," apparently. Other attractions blazoned on the cover are Adios al top less [Goodbye, Topless] y bienvenida al desnudo integral [and Welcome, Total Nudity]. Another: Lesbianas muy chics [Real chic lesbians]. Gustan a los hombres [They like men], pero ellas las prefieren ultrafemininas y sexys [but they like 'em ultrafeminine and sexy].

If the cover fails to turn you on, the contents page may. Featured there is el look ninfa (the Nymph Look), illustrated by a picture of a remarkably beautiful young woman with swept-back Miss Liberty hair, reclining on a divan and robed in an off-the-shoulder diaphanous rose-pink Grecian tunic that translucently reveals her breasts, nipples, belly, left flank, and legs. These (the legs) are flung over the nether arm of the divan, the back of her long-boned left hand resting on her hip palm up, fingers curled, thereby concealing the shadowy arc of her pubis. Another picture, in black and white, shows an exceptionally sultry brunette-a classical Spanish beauty one envisions with a rose between her teeth and a tortoiseshell comb: eyes of Nefertiti, blue-black hair combed severely back across the ears into a bun-dressed in a midriff top and a multitude of tulle skirts, her left hip cocked in a flamenco dancer's attitude ("Come and get it, baby, if you're man enough"), left hand, arm akimbo, hitching the several skirts up to the buttock level, high enough to expose all of her corresponding leg, right hand, arm akimbo, lifting the skirts high on the tender inside flank of her other leg, permitting the skirts to fall between the two hands in a lovely drape of the material just below the model's shadowed crotch.

But that is not the most arresting illustration on the page, no. The most arresting illustration, in full color, displays three surly male peacocks who, the caption proclaims, are tres canallas en el divan (three swine/blackguards in the divan, whatever being "in the divan" signifies idiomatically). They are children of Genet. They are second-generation Francoise Sagan (Bonjour Tristesse) and her punk existentialist crowd.

Don Ernesto Alterio, to the left, sports a goodly mop of curly black hair, combed back from a high narrow forehead, a long straight nose, and a close-cropped Mephistophelean mustache and beard. He is shown in three- quarter profile, chin tucked down slightly, gazing up at the viewer out of large brown orbs surrounded by ample whites, the left eyebrow (oh so artfully) cocked, pink lips tightly clamped. (The fabric of his black turtleneck sags just a smidgen at the belly, poor fellow, immanency of middle age!) Presiding in the center of the picture is Don Mariano Borroso, who wears a highly figured print shirt opened down to the third button. His hair is combed back also, curly and black, but fatidically thinner than Sr. Alterio's, showing more of the high forehead. He stares aloofly at the viewer out of shadowed eyes, lips clamped tight and straight across, in the same f***-off attitude of Sr. Alterio. The third of the trio is Don Alberto San Juan, dressed in sky-blue jeans and a tight-fitting matching semi-tank-top, revealing a right arm from top of shoulder to wrist, a limb that is remarkable for its smooth absence of muscle. A fetching elastic band encircles the arm just below its pit, where a bicep, were there one, would begin its bulge. Sr. San Juan's hair is (guess what?) black and curly and combed back from a not so high forehead, showing oily black ducktails at the nape of the neck. He sports a Dr. Faustus beard and mustache that is unsuccessful either because it was just recently sprouted or because he borrows his razor and clippers from Yasser Arafat. Straight black brows, brown eyes, long fleshy nose, and lips clamped in the identical the-hell-with-you expression of his companions.

Nothing more artificial nor so insolent can be imagined than the poses of these three low-life gentlemen, who are so similar in appearance and expression that they might be cousins, and who, one instantly concludes, must either be members of some scabrous Latin-rock group or waiters on holiday from a Mediterranean resort. Presumably, they are idols of the readership of the magazine, who are, almost certainly, teenage and twenty- something New Age Spanish urban females. There are appropriate words in the language for riffraff of their order: quinquis, chulos, the former term denoting street hoodlums (in England they might be likened to skinheads), the latter being the term for pimps, but connoting besides a brash, insufferable personality. (In French there is an appropriate term also, une tete a gifler, a head born to be slapped.)