Enjoy Your Style

A few weeks ago, I made a collage from a cover of Cosmopolitan magazine and posted it online. The idea behind the collage was to poke a bit of fun at magazines like Cosmo and Glamour, with their stories like “What Teen’s Hottest Hunks Really Think About Your Blackheads.” When I made it, I was just “fooling around,” and had no idea it would take off.

Well, take off it did! I remember logging into my e-mail and seeing “128 new messages.” My first thought was: some Nigerian prince is in terrible trouble. As it turned out, those messages were just notifications that so-and-so had reblogged this post. (Thank you, by the way.) A similar collage received a similar response.

Since people dig these collages, I thought, why not make a complete maga/zine in this vein? “Women’s” magazines are chock full of risible material, as well as pages that can be altered to suit another purpose, from blackout poems (blacking out all the words in a story save a few) to making multi-media collages to, of course, speech bubbles and “real” news headlines (“4000 DIE IN secret sex ATTACK”).

If this sounds like fun to you, keep reading. I’ve “improved” half a dozen complete magazines, with more to come. All will have original content not on this (or any other) website. I call these maga/zines or magaZines, because I can’t think of a name more descriptive than that.

These magazines are for sale for $10 each. Shipping is included for US customers; for Mexican and Canadian customers, shipping is $7-15 USD. Shipping to Europe and beyond is forthcoming; check the order page for more information.

I should get a P.O. Box within the next week or two––so, if you want to save some money, send me undoctored magazine(s) with a money order (or check, or well concealed cash) for ~$5/magazine, plus a few stamps for shipping.

On a personal note, thanks to everyone who responded to those posts, positively or negatively. I’m glad to have your feedback. The response took me a bit by surprise but it was a pleasant surprise. I hope you have a good day.

Elizabeth

Links:

Order Page

Cosmo Collage

Allure Collage

Women who focus on style over substance usually find themselves in a big fucking hole, with other men who want to fuck the hole. Oh so smooth, and none sophistacted. Because, you know, how sophisticated can hole fucking really be?

— Emilie Autumn

This is a collage I made from an old issue of “Cosmopolitan” magazine. All of the text you see was taken from inside the magazine, cut out and pasted onto the cover, to give the reader a more accurate idea of the magazine’s contents.

As the owner of a style/fashion/beauty website, I hate women’s magazines like this. Style should be about discovering, inventing and expressing yourself. At the very least, style (as something to learn and explore) should make you feel good. But the messages sent by these magazines lower the reader’s consciousness and increase her myopic self-absorption, at the expense of self-awareness and deep thought.

Another problem I have with these magazines is their scattershot approach to self-improvement. It’s bad enough that they do harm; they ought not to pretend to do good as well. Their so-called “helpful” articles (“Food for Healthy Breasts,” “Your OB/GYN and You,” “Binge Drinking”) have a few facts, taken out of context and endorsed by an anonymous doctor at the Mayo Clinic or somewhere like that. No one can remember these tidbits for more than a few minutes, at best. It would be better, and more honest, to recommend a series of nonfiction books which present this information systematically, such as “The Young Woman’s Guide to Her Body,” “Healthy Food, Happy Life” or “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Alcohol and Drugs (But Were Afraid to Ask).” (These aren’t real books, just examples.)

If you like this collage, you can buy an entire maga/zine in this vein, here. That means 100-200 pages of delicious culture jam, yours for only $10. Read the follow up post here.

It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest—if you do, you will become less enviable…It is this which explains the absent, unfocused look of so many glamour images. They look out over the looks of envy which sustain them.

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.

— John Berger in Ways of Seeing (via this article)