You've Got Mail

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, July 1, 2002

Byline: Simon Dumenco

Most people read In Style for the celebrity-inspired fashion, beauty, and lifestyle tips. I read it for the letters to the editor.

Don't get me wrong: The celebtastic stories are plenty riveting. In the current issue, for instance, we find out that of all his physical features, Christian Slater most likes his teeth. ("My dentist is very impressed.") Toni Colette has soft skin. ("My face feels like a baby's bum - not that I play with baby bums often.") Jennifer Love Hewitt washes her hair every day. ("My hair has a huge stink factor after, like, 24 hours!")

An embarrassment of riches, really. But for me the real fun begins each month on the "Special Delivery" pages, where letters from readers who can't get enough of In Style appear. My obsession began with the January 2001 issue, thanks to a reader from Passaic Park, New Jersey, who wrote in to say that "a thick issue" (is there any other kind?) of In Style "saved [her] from injury recently." On the way to her train, she felt a mugger tugging at her purse. "I had all of fifty cents in there," she explained, "but I also had a Kate Spade makeup bag filled with Nars, Shu Uemura and Stila products and was not about to hand it over without a struggle." Her mugger swung at her and "I held up my In Style and blocked the blow!"

My reaction in two words: Holy shit. (My other reaction: I'm hoping against all hope that Lifetime will option that letter for an original movie starring Sarah Michelle Gellar.)

Since that issue, I've made it a point to turn, greedily, right to the letters pages whenever I get the latest In Style. "For my never-ending quest for a subtle nail color," one reader wrote recently, "what's the polish Faith Hill wears?" (Such curiosity!) "Your magazine is a breath of fresh air," another reader wrote. "I am glad it is not devoted to finding a man or giving advice on how to keep him." (Such independence!) "I have to have the sunglasses Julianne Moore wore in Hannibal," wrote yet another reader. (Such single-mindedness!)

You think I'm being a bitch, and I am. But mostly what I feel when I read those letters is not snobbery, but worry. I worry about the mindset of people who not only devour In Style, but take time out of their busy days to write a letter to its editors. Do they also dash off admiring, inquisitive missives to the J. Crew catalog? Fan letters to the Gap? Letters to the editors of magazines are supposed to be heartening (even when they're critical): They're indicators of a thoughtful, engaged readership. But it's impossible to be heartened by readers who are thoroughly engaged by a magazine that exists solely to sell clothing and makeup - to create overpowering, toe-curling shoplust - by leveraging off the promotional needs of the celebrity-industrial complex. Most magazines do that to some small or large extent, of course, but In Style really exists to do nothing but that.

Magazines used to offer narrative. Now, increasingly, they push product - in part because the product-pushing In Style is the 500-pound gorilla of the magazine industry, the success that everyone wants to emulate. Since the advent of In Style (and the launch of In Style wannabes like Lucky and Us Weekly), the focus of countless magazines has changed from that most essential human activity, storytelling, to shopping - or storytelling about celebrity shopping.

It's an easy trap to fall into: Because we think of actors and singers as leading interesting, inventive, fairy-tale lives, readers (and editors) presume they're invariably worth spending time with; we trust that they're worth mindshare. Because Julianne Moore has created art (I'd like to make every In Style reader study her performance in Todd Haynes' Safe), because she lives artfully, it's easy to think that she will always have something artful and uplifting to say. The problem is that In Style's monotheism - shopping is the key to salvation - results in an unprecedented and entirely pernicious type of tunnel vision. (In Style induces depth perception problems; it should come with a warning label: objects and lifestyles in magazine are shallower than they appear.) And, therefore, it relies on an obsessively narrow line of questioning that borders on autistic. ("What do you use on your hair?")

Precisely because In Style is so effective - because it's a consumer stroke book of unprecedented seductiveness - it has the all-consuming impact of a mind-altering drug. In the latest issue, for instance, a reader confesses that she was so taken with a recent story on Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith's beautiful home that it "made the hairs on [her] neck stand right up!" She further admits, "I can't quit picturing it in my mind."

What is that if not a cry for help?

Cultural and media historians needn't look any further than the "Special Delivery" pages of In Style to track the magazine industry's - and our readers' - souldeath. The letters to the editor are the forensic evidence.

Simon Dumenco ( sd17@aol.com ) doesn't wear nail polish or sunglasses.