What the well-dressed woman is thinking - fashion magazines; In Defense of Elegance - Cover Story

National Review, Oct 28, 1996 by Lisa Schiffren

IT'S not easy, reading through stacks of fashion magazines in search of political philosophy. Think of towering haystacks and slender needles. But to save NR readers the trouble of lugging around phone-book-thick glossy magazines redolent, not to say reeking, of perfume ads, I have systematically studied the nation's leading fashion magazines to determine just what the well-dressed woman is thinking. I am not a devotee of the fashion magazines, though of course I happily read them at the hairdresser. Partly, this because so much of what has been fashionable in clothing, culture, and mores in my lifetime has been so vulgar and unattractive that I am repulsed by the mindless enthusiasm with which Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Mirabella, Mademoiselle, and the others typically embrace the new, regardless of merit.

When it comes to products -- this season's rags and potions -- they can't help it. They are foremost industry touts, eager to celebrate whatever designers think someone will buy and wear, the ludicrous along with the lovely. When it comes to ideas, attitudes, mores, and politics, editors have considerably more leeway to reject the offensive and shape an ethos. Yet, the fashion books have been routinely politically correct on all the issues important to liberals and, particularly, feminists. An epidemic of abortion is treated with frequent, urgent scare stories -- every magazine I read has run a piece in the past two years -- warning that ''Your rights are endangered . . .'' and accompanied by pictures of dead abortionists and tales of woe from clinic operators. That illegitimacy imperils democracy is not a consideration in Vogue's October cover story celebrating Madonna as ''mother, and fashion force.''

Intellectual fashions change more slowly than skirt lengths, but change they do. Across the land liberalism has collapsed of its own weight. The only people who pay attention to the demands of orthodox feminists are liberal Republicans seeking to close the gender gap. Big earnest government is as dated as big cemented hair. So when does conservatism get chic?

Guess what; it's happening. Slowly, in little bursts, often highly camouflaged, our ideas are being paraded down the runway.

But perhaps you are wondering why we are concerned at all with the politics of publications that really do cut their principles to fit this year's fashion?

Because they are influential. If NR could sell ideas the way Vogue sells dresses, Phil Gramm would be our next President. When the lipstick editor at Harper's Bazaar says brown is the new fall color, armies of otherwise attractive women march around looking two weeks dead until it's time for the new spring color. Try to think of, say, Mirabella as a chi-chi boutique in the marketplace of ideas.

So, of course, you're dying to know, What's Hot Now? Purple, as it happens, is the new fall color. Lesbian marriage is the hot lifestyle/social-justice cause. Breast cancer has edged out AIDS as the important disease. And, in election coverage, the smarter, more upmarket fashion magazines are backing away from Bill Clinton pretty briskly.

Mademoiselle and Glamour are not the smarter fashion magazines. Their huge readerships are made up of relatively younger women, not necessarily college-educated, professional, or affluent. Mademoiselle does not have much in the way of traditional political reporting, and Glamour, which does, is as doctrinaire a feminist publication as can be found outside a women's studies department.

To quote Cynthia Grenier, the Washington Times's magazine columnist, ''They're hopelessly feminist but entirely confused, since they're all about men: how to lure them, how to please them in bed. They're extremely explicit.''

I'll say. Both Mademoiselle and Glamour run monthly columns devoted to answering readers' (made up, surely) questions about sex. We're not talking about strategy here, a girl-talk classic. We are talking about things so odd and explicit, addressed in a manner simultaneously clinical and downright smutty, that we are not actually going to talk about them here.

The October Mademoiselle exemplifies the cultural confusion. It features a brave, throwback cover story on ''single and loving it,'' even though everyone knows that being single is really very uncool right now, a major reversal that happened overnight in the early Nineties, when the baby boom woke up to the biological alarm clock. It is the hipness of marriage, surely, which explains the very au courant cri de coeur, ''Why Can't We Get Married? A gay woman speaks out.'' Her earnest plea for ''respect for love'' is accompanied by two not unattractive women in evening gowns on a beach. Cool, huh? (All the fashion magazines ignore the decidedly less titillating notion of gay-male marriage.)

Glamour's September issue was brimming with tendentious politics. The issue included the results of a reader opinion poll which was overwhelmingly in favor of gay marriage. Nearby was a ''one-minute interview with Bush Administration Secretary of Labor Lynn Martin on her work policing Mitsubishi's efforts to clean up its sexual-harassment record. Skeptical title -- ''Is This Woman on Our Side?'' Reporter's conclusion? Maybe. (The reporter is wrong. Miss Martin is a charter member of the recently revived Rockefeller/Whitman wing of the party, whose liberalism should not be underestimated.)