I complete my seasonal trilogy of dubiously reprinted 1940s articles with "Magazines for women" by Lesley Blanch, from The Adventure Ahead: A Contact Book published by Contact Publications Limited in March 1948.
HOWEVER different their formula, women’s magazines all start from the same basic supposition that the reader’s first interest is men. Directly or indirectly, subconsciously, even, this is the motive that actuates every page: crochet pattern, Paris fashion, or advice to the love-lorn. There are, broadly speaking, three approaches to the subject. How to get your man. How to keep him. How to get another. These three approaches tally with the three divisions of price and class into which women’s magazines fall. The cheapest weeklies, pulps of the Peg’s Paper or The Miracle kind, are concerned with lurid novelette versions of the man-hunt, persecuted innocence, Cinderella, or girl meets Boss. The middle group, Home Notes, Everywoman, Housewife, Woman, Mother and such, strike a steadier note, and concentrate on how to keep your man inside the domestic circle (nourishing hot-pots, tactful maternity clothes, growing old gracefully). The top-price group, the fashion and glamour glossies, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and others, infer a perpetual state of sophisticated youth, beauty and elegance which would be plainly wasted on one man alone. This is the luxury world where it is assumed there is plenty of everything, even men, and the reader, preserved in the aspic of elegance, will wear the right clothes, at the right places, with the right people. This is often described in the American Press as ‘gracious living’. It is a phrase or an attitude towards life which has had considerable effect on the top-flight British women’s magazines. There is no doubt that women’s magazines have an enormous influence over their readers. That is, over those who absorb and take seriously the printed word, as opposed to those who merely flick over the pictures. This was realised early on in the war by the Ministry of Information, which held special conferences for the women’s Press, to discuss with the editors the best means of approaching British women both by direct and by insidious methods. The editors responded nobly. They sensed their responsibilities, one and all. Besides, to certain types long grown stale on Nookery Cookery or Our Jolliest Holiday Snap, these sudden glimpses of stern reality were tonic. The confidential, inside-information air about the proceedings was like some heady draught of wine. ‘. . . Another convoy has been sunk. Sir George thinks gravely of the sardine situation . . . We count on all you ladies to deprecate the nutritious value of sardines for a month or so . . . Now, as you all know, the corset manufacturers sent the Board of Trade a memo about releasing more girdles for expectant factory workers . . . But could you perhaps work up your readers’ patriotic sense about suspenders being a sheer luxury today? . . . We’d like you to co-operate on the new Ministry of Health drive about ringworm, too. . .’ Ringworm, tapeworm, the itch, cold bread pudding, varicose veins, caloric deficiencies, black-out blues. . . All the meaner aspects of that finest hour were their problem, and glowing with a new sense of responsibility, the women’s magazines rose to the occasion. From the pulps to the glossies, they were on their mettle. Conscientiously, if a trifle laboriously, they tried to reconcile the grim realities with escapist peeps at permissible frivolities—a wartime wedding, or eye-catching luxuries that always had to turn out to be dolled-up necessities or left-overs. Each magazine interpreted the struggle in its own manner. Becoming ways with factory overalls; the glamour of the women’s Services; yet more tricks with powdered egg; how to set your own hair, to turn your old mink coat; what the well-dressed shelterer looks like. And always, how to get and keep your man; though, of course, this became rather an academic point when the second front got under way. How to write to him vividly, magnetically; how to love that evacuee; to pat away the worry lines, and if they seemed too, too intractable, well then, how to have a lovely and serene expression. So much better than make-up (a good line, this, after what the Ministry of Information said about cheap cosmetics and the dermatitis scare). How to be interested in ‘Other Things’. (Example: The Royal Family’s love of music and the arts. Illustrate with photograph of Queen and Princesses at National Gallery lunch-time concert.) Thus the editors, who were not themselves, at that time, always noticeable for their own serene expressions. Certain magazines, however scrupulously they responded, must have found their very names, or trademark title, a handicap at that time. Vogue, for instance, started at a disadvantage to its rival, the equally de luxe Harper’s Bazaar, which sounded less of an anachronism. Woman and Beauty, too, had a rather guilty ring, whereas Housewife, Woman, Good Housekeeping or Britannia and Eve all sounded suitable to the darkest days. Though Home Chat or Home Notes may have been tormenting to all those evacuees who found themselves far from home, it was never too exotic. Today, in a world hardly more stable or rosy, British women’s magazines have seized the moment, with no backward or forward glances, to luxuriate in the few new fripperies, in golden prospects of nylons for all, new French fashions and an ever rolling tide of newer and better merchandise—sometime. It is still uphill work, though, especially for the luxury, non-fiction fashion magazines which have no choice but to tease their readers with wonderful photographs of exquisite clothes for export only—and have to spend even more ingenuity over Cookery and Renovation pages which must now appear compatible with a peacetime luxury magazine. But whatever the circumstances, the basic structure of women’s magazines remains undisturbed, Whether the reader breeds the type of magazine or the magazine the type of reader is a debatable point. Generally, the cheaper the magazine, the more its readers write in for advice. To this group of readers, the factory girl and the one-time domestic worker, the printed word is magic. They would far sooner consult The Oracle than a friend. Their faith in the printed word is such that it approaches mumbo-jumbo worship. They have little use for doctors, preferring to ask Nurse Jones. Their emotional problems, too, are confided to Faith’s Corner; ‘Ask Mrs Margaret, your friend’ gets them every time. This being so, it is fortunate that such departments are usually run by a competent individual, or by a trained nurse. A treacly note is apparent in most. ‘It is bad luck your chum/sister is going steady with your very own boy friend. I'm so sorry, dear, but cheer up, better luck next time’ might not seem worth the stamp to you or me, but evidently the lonely readers think otherwise, for the letters pour in, year after year. Occasionally, a rather sharper note is struck. ‘I cannot answer questions of this type here. I advise you to see a doctor’ always hints, to the idle reader, monstrous possibilities. Some magazines find that the ratio of printable questions is so slight, most of them requiring confidential replies, that their correspondence page is left almost blank. Then the staff step in with juicy, specially devised problems, provocative to the unsuspecting reader. One magazine which was in the habit of selecting a prize letter in each issue got into deep waters when, one Christmas-time, the junior sub-editor concocted, among others, a heart-rending problem letter from a contrite mother who had tipped her child into a bath of boiling water. Unhappily, some revelling printer put it in the prize-winning place at the top of the page, wreathed for this issue in holly and hung with bells, and headed it ‘A Merry Christmas!’ The original correspondents’ confidante was the American, Dorothy Dix, whose idea it was, fifty years ago, when she was struggling along as a woman’s-page hack. It was an overnight success and has remained so. Although now a plump and grannie-like figure, nearing eighty, Dorothy Dix is never mawkish in her replies. To a letter from a girl who wrote: ‘I went out with a young man of whom I am very fond, and found it necessary to take several cocktails in order not to appear unsophisticated, though I am not used to drink. Did I do wrong?’ Mrs Dix replied succinctly: ‘Quite probably’. A markedly prudish tone prevails among the lower group of magazines. The editors maintain a line which is both conventional and genteel. The Bonniest Baby Competition is seldom allowed to be won by a piccaninny, although there are always some dusky entrants. The word ‘tummy’ is preferred to ‘stomach’. ‘Belly’ is not used. ‘Tiny’ or ‘wee’ is evidently thought to mitigate the unpleasantness of certain topics. Nurse replies: ‘Perhaps Baby Gloria has a tiny bit of diarrhoea, bless her. Why not try a wee dose of starch?’ Hints on how to overcome children’s bad habits gloss over the more disagreeable ones and dwell on little irritations like fidgeting (not with each other, of course). On the other hand, the fiction could not possibly be of a cruder type. The pulps are all of a piece. Blonde heroine, raven villainess, city girl who comes down to the farm to catch the rustic hero in her web. She stops at nothing short of sexual immorality: pushes victims over cliffs, deserts babies, steals jewels, lies, poses as someone else. The narrative is melodramatic and the dialogue stilted. ‘Black rage filled Joan’s heart as she saw the man she loved gazing into the violet eyes of her hated rival.’ Or: ‘Little did Ruby suspect that an unseen watcher plotted to ruin her happiness.’ ‘Her Innocence Made Her An Outcast: Read this amazing serial commencing in our next number.’ In the end, the bad girl always comes to a bad end, but she is never handed over to the police. Some sentimental convention demands that hero and heroine shall forgive her before she dies a natural or unnatural death. Much of the fiction in the middle group, too, is sexy pipe-dream stuff, all sheiks, and the desert is a land of romances. [Everyman’s lies in the middle category of women’s magazines. It costs 9d monthly, is shiny without being glossy, contains hints on how to make a Swiss roll or plug a draughty crack, but reaches upwards towards the Vogue treatment of fashion—the ‘chic’ headline, the beautiful model elegantly posed, and the wide display of different type; yet the magazine’s readership is revealed in the text which describes how the shawl and cape, those ‘adorable evening pretties’, should be knitted. Vogue’s readers would not, on the whole, be interested in the instructions.] Stepping up into higher middle class, middle price range, there is a more sophisticated approach to the same sort of material. There are generous wedges of fiction, usually well illustrated, in the dynamic Saturday Evening Post style, with a lot of cookery and little titbits of fashion, a mothercraft or nursery club run by a woman doctor, a Rainbow Corner of advice and good cheer, usually devoted to readers’ problems, triangles, wife versus secretary, poison pen letters and little squabbles. Then, too, there are personality pages and events of more or less snob interest. In some magazines, this is a sort of tea-table gossip. In others, in diary form, the writer is in on everything, a super-being who combines the mileage of a commercial traveller with the social stamina of a debutante. Sometimes there is a personal page or column, usually under some rather surprising yet well-known signature, often a man’s. Thus we find Mr Beverley Nichols contributing ‘My World’ to Woman’s Own, where, under such headings as ‘We Must Smile’ or ‘A Song in Her Heart’, he rambles on radiantly about sermons in stone and God in everything. In Home Notes, Mr Collie Knox is ‘Talking to you’ about a variety of subjects in an over-the-tea-cups way which, no doubt, is just the ticket for his readers. The Queen and The Lady both spread themselves on the day-to-day doings of Royalty. ‘Her Majesty the Queen is very fond of a homely Scottish tea and laughingly admits she has brought her daughters up to cook the scones and bannocks of her childhood’s home.’ Or ‘Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, accompanied by the two Princesses, looked delightful in charming shades of hydrangea blue and mauve . . . ’ The Queen, which has been much enlivened, has a rather carping column called ‘Comment’, which seems mostly to comment unfavourably on Labour policies, and has articles about life in the Colonies, new shows and clothes. Woman and Beauty stands out in this middle group as being a beautifully slick, sophisticated magazine, very much alive and in the American tradition. Its price and subject matter keep it in the middle category, but by its handling of the subjects and general presentation, it verges on to the top flight. In this top-line group, we find Good Housekeeping which, true to its title, is homely. There is a small section on fashion and beauty, and a lot of goodish fiction, cookery, interior decoration and features on new books and plays. There is a solid air of well-being which is just off smug at times. With Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, glossy glamour is at its peak. These magazines devote themselves to the luxuries of life which, to them, are necessities: the Haute Couture in London and Paris; social or snob features from the inside; the latest nuances of elegance. Their interior decoration and cookery pages assume an extremely sophisticated palate. ‘Amusing’ cheeses to go with ‘interesting’ wines. Something about bouillabaisse rather than tempting ways with cod. They devote space to the arts, the exhibitions, music, the theatre and various phases of intellectual life in London, Paris and New York. All this is called ‘Gracious Living’, the cornerstone of their policy, though during the war some of the harassed staff used to refer to these almost unattainably high standards as ‘Good Gracious Living’. Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar round up first-class contributors such as Rebecca West, Kay Boyle or Peter Quennell. They maintain a brilliant level of mise-en page. The finest artists and photographers alone will do. They reproduce the work of Tchelitchew, Chagall, Dufy, Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore. Their photographers are legendary—Cecil Beaton, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Lee Miller, Hoyningen-Huene, de Meyer, Rawlinson, Horst, Blumenfeld. The beauty of the models, the superlative merchandise, the clothes and accessories are all worthy of these outstanding photographers. It is a dazzling display, punctually presented, once a month, for the sum of a few shillings. Both these magazines are of American origin. Vogue is published in three editions, the parent American, and French and British editions as the offshoots. They are much indebted, as is the British Harper’s, to the material which they pick up and adapt, or re-edit, from America. This does not imply that they are pale shadows of the original, but rather that they are the richer for those extra resources upon which they draw. Both magazines are in close touch with Paris, where they keep a French office, a most eclectic affair, concentrated on all the most fashionable intelligence, the arts and delights of the city. Here again, on a rarified level, we have the gossip column, the little whispers of advice. But where it was Advice to the Love-lorn, here it is Advice to the Girl without a penny, and the first whisper probably advises her to invest in a model suit. Or else it’s the Bargain Buy—the Bond Street Bargain, that is. Here ‘Handy Home Hints’ are replaced by cute tips for chic. How to tie your pearl chocker with pink office tape. How to try two shades of lipstick simultaneously. ‘Be bee-stung in two tones of Rosy-Posy.’ There are patterns and tips as to where the best of everything is found. A letter from Leicester tells of the joys of a hunting week-end. The opera will be heard from a box, or at any rate, the Royal Circle. Sometimes a self-consciously slummy evening is spent—‘Going Gay on a Shoe String’, pub crawling, or at the Met. or the Bedford. These economic jaunts were very fashionable after Munich cast its shadow on the glitter. Over the years, the tone of the captions and copy varies little. Hard put to it how to ring the changes on adjectives proper to hats and such, the copy writers seek inspiration in contemporary fiction, songhits, or anthologies of poetry and quotation. ‘Lady into Fox’ was a godsend to fur fashions, winter after winter. ‘ “Night and Day” you'll want to wear this sleek little black dress.’ ‘She’s my lovely’ or ‘She walks in beauty’ are both winners. ‘Whereas in silk my Julia goes’ crops up regularly. Telescoped words and brightly punned allusions are much favoured by the middle group magazines. ‘Arms and the Man’ accompanies a piece about care of the elbows and is illustrated by a sexy picture of a girl in a sleeveless dress, clinging to a well-dressed boy. ‘Rural-luring’ is the title for an alluring print dress to wear on rural occasions. There is a more scientific approach to both fashion and beauty culture in the top group than in the middle and lower strata. This is probably due to the influence of such magazines as Votre Beauté, Restez Jeune and the American You which go into highly technical details on every aspect of women's physical well-being. Distinguished surgeons discuss glandular treatments, the for-and-against of plastic surgery, diet, breast-lifting versus brassières, pregnancy after 40, freedom in sex relationships, constipation, the sweat-gland system, the menopause. Nothing is too delicate to be tackled with expertise, while retaining an overall air of expensive elegance. ‘Ask Nurse’ gentility has a faded amateurism beside ‘100 Facts and Fallacies about Conception’. [The discretion of an embrace — In the Lady’s Magazine or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, published in 1780, the tearful farewell outside the park gates was permissible provided that the emphasis was on sorrow, and a discreet strip of moonlight was allowed to filter between the two figures. In 1948 the passionate embrace is a common feature of most women’s magazine stories, but the degree of passion, the intimacy of the embrace, becomes less and less marked the lower the social group for which the magazine is designed. Women’s Own, a threepenny weekly, has a whimsy cover and appealing contributors (‘another article by Beverley next week’), but is not shy of daring illustrations. Woman and Home, a 9d monthly for the suburbs carries articles on needlework and new salads, but a large section is given up to the short story and serial story with a strong love interest. Two typical characters are Dick and Anne—in their appearance, attitudes and modesty derived directly from the hero and heroine types of the censor-controlled film. [Then there is] The Miracle: Threepennyworth every Saturday of three close columns of type for the older schoolgirl, tweeny and junior factory miss. The story ‘One Girl’s Courage’ adopts throughout a high moral tone reflected in the decorous embrace by which it is illustrated. ‘When you are free, George’, the One Girl says wistfully on being release, ‘not before. The sort of happiness we want can’t be gained the easy way’.] So much for the women’s magazines. What about the women who run them? With certain exceptions, they, too, run true to type. There is no mistaking the lovelies of the top group. The Fashion Editors, the Beauty Editors, the Social Editors are all as fashionable and beautiful and social as the reader could wish. Their counterparts on the more aspiring of the runners-up strive to be even more so. They are a spectacular lot, usually seen lunching at the Ivy, holding their own among the theatre and film stars. Looking at these perfectly groomed and poised products, it is hard to imagine they have anything to do with the dingy world of printers, proof-reading, copywriting and general editorial chores, yet they often do, though this side of the work is in some offices delegated to the less showy copy writers or sub-editor drudges, while the queen bee’s task is to flit from flower to flower, sampling the sweets of gracious living before pronouncing on them to the reader. These women are divided into two sorts: those who have climbed the hard way and those who have not. The latter are probably employed because they are good shop windows. They are rich enough to dress well on their own means (no one could dress really well on the average woman’s magazine pay); or because, being well-to-do, they can be offered token salaries; or because they know everybody, and (sinister phrase beloved of the topflighters) ‘get around’ and can be relied upon for inside information about socialite living, acting as liaison between the two worlds of Press and Court Circular. But the others, those who climbed the hard way, and who probably began on some insignificant provincial paper, know the game inside out and are flinty business women behind their expensive façades, Coming to luxury late and by hard work, they never tire of the glitter. For them, no fitting is ever too long, no facial pack too heavy, no amount of new rituals and diets too rigorous. They are eager guinea-pigs for every new craze. For them, no lunch is digestible unless it is at the right place, with the right people. They have long ago given up their home life, and now live as openly as goldfish. Sometimes their husbands trail along in the wake, as the ladies jet-propel themselves, hourly, into higher, more chic strata. Their day runs something like this: a very early morning made hideous by setting-up exercises, a meticulous toilette, and into the office (a manicure, en route) where, with the drive of a combustion engine, they demolish or construct the work in preparation, according to the last minute exigencies of the mode. Then off to the hair‑dresser, or the dressmaker. Then, perhaps, lunch with a wholesale manufacturer and an advertising manager (business is business after all). An afternoon, at one of the big dress shows, sitting on little gold chairs, among the rival editors : selecting the models to be shown in the next issue, ordering just one more for themselves, perhaps, and fighting, silky-steely with the rivals, for first pick to photograph. Then a fleeting visit to a new art gallery (must remind the gossip-page editor not to go on so about the Tate. This man is better copy, he’s a nephew of Prince Popoff). On to the photographic studio to receive the Duchess. who has promised to pose in her tiara and Molyneux’s yellow satin. (Memo: did Elsie ring up the detective agency about the tiara being brought by taxi? Be careful not to let the American actress know the Duchess has chosen the yellow dress or she’ll remember it was promised to her . . . Oh dear . . .) Back to the office for an aspirin and a sloshy cup of tea, while the Art Editor expounds his views on ‘bleeding’ the lead, that is, of using photographs without margins for the leading article. Then a Critical Conference. These are post-mortems held by some magazines, to dissect, page by page, the foregoing issue—as opposed to a Planning Conference, when forthcoming issues are mapped out. Just time to get Paris on the long-distance, about that cable from America on the new tunic line, and the exclusive write-up of Cocteau’s caravan, designed by Bérard. Then—quick—into another hat and matching nail varnish and off to have a drink with the Denham publicity chiefs, dug in at the Dorchester, who are being so co-operative about letting the starlets pose for the Junior Mademoiselle number. A bit of a rush, but there is still time to get home and change for the ballet first night, and then it's plain sailing . . . Go round afterwards and see what everyone is saying to Petrova—(is that a Dior she is wearing?)—and on to the newest night club. Well, call it a day: it’s a typical day for some of these indestructible editors; though, to be just, it was, I think, more typical before the war. During the war, they discovered home life (in strict moderation, of course), and received their friends wearing dramatic negligees, and served delicious little snacks they had prepared themselves, daringly flavoured with garlic, and usually set out on an inconveniently low coffee table. This, it was inferred, was all so much more in keeping with the impromptu nature of the best wartime hospitality. Nowadays, they continue their high pressure pattern more fitfully than before the war, often between bouts of queueing or other household cares, and are apt to turn up with a string bag bulging with broccoli or hake. The Social editors are a forlorn band, usually of high birth, titled or otherwise, who are snared by the prospect of earning money by the sort of qualifications they possess—good manners, breeding, charm. They must rely upon these attributes to get them through all kinds of awkward situations which are part of the Social editor’s job. They are the catspaws that pick out the stately, unapproachable minor royalty and unbend it so far as to be photographed exclusively, intimately. They must snare the distinguished personalities who are too snob to be approached by any but personal contact means. (‘Let's see, Mary married her second husband’s son by another wife. I might write to Mary about her letting us photograph the new house.’) They must put their names and connections to all sorts of uses. A thankless task, for the Editor-in-Chief never feels the Social editor has taken sufficient advantage of her name, while the snob personalities always feel she has taken too much. In general, these high-flight magazines obtain an almost mesmeric hold over the lives of their staff. It is considered that to be on such a paper is tantamount to surrendering all private life or interests. From fashion staff to copy writers, it is felt that all should live dedicated lives. Dedicated to chic, that is. Usually, in an atmosphere of sharp, though veiled competition, the ladies toil and spin to look as like lilies of the field as possible. There is an air of camaraderie and everyone is ‘divine’ to everyone else. On some magazines, the editors maintain a particularly matey note and encourage their staff to confide their love affairs to them. In any case, the atmosphere of a woman’s paper is usually brittle with neurosis, jealousy, sick-headaches and throbbing emotional tension. On each desk, among the band-boxes and the tissue-paper wrappings round the model clothes brought in for inspection, there is an extraordinary range of patent medicines by which the temperament and physique of each desk’s owner can be gauged in her absence. Stomach mixtures for the fashion editors and slimming pills, too. Nerve tonics for the Social girls. Sedatives for the copy writers and aspirin for all. There is a wild melange of proofs, tangled, shrilling telephones, messenger boys and untouched photographs in all their brutality. Most of the staff are used as guinea-pigs by the Beauty editors who prefer to try out the creams and packs before endorsing them. When it comes to rejuvenating hormone preparations, however, it is more tricky, as the age factor, whatever the haggard appearance of the guinea-pigs, is of prime importance. Perfume trials are more popular, though the atmosphere is apt to become rather confusing, when the entire staff reeks of Amour-Amour or Vers toi. One of the most progressive American women’s papers carried guinea-pigging to extreme lengths when it persuaded one of the married staff to stay on and handle an Expectant Mother’s serial, conducted over nine months, the diary of a perfect pregnancy. Readers went step by step along the way. They took orange juice, reported to the clinic regularly, wore ‘gay deceiver’ maternity smocks, sewed the layette and decorated the nursery, in a sort of cosy, mass-maternity mood, until, coming out from the anaesthetic, the new baby was introduced, a dedicated child, to continue its dedicated existence, this time on the Nursery page. Some editors furnish their offices in a rather drawing-room way—perhaps to recapture the atmosphere of that home life they have so long abandoned. Rich pile carpets, chintz curtains, Victorian knick-knacks, flowers, a picture or two. They do not, however, return the business man’s compliment of having a photograph of his wife and children conspicuously present. You will never see a husband’s photograph in a woman’s office. As to children, few of them are the breeding kind. Perhaps it’s the life. But love affairs—that’s a different story. Here, we have a field day. Everyone, from the telephone operator to the editor, knows when Miss de Smythe’s fiancé hasn’t shown up for a fortnight, or when Miss Brown’s first husband (the Portuguese Count) brought flowers and then gave them to the receptionist and tried to date her for that same evening. It’s all very family, and though all editors are iron-fisted, some have particularly velvety gloves: especially where the love affairs of their staff are concerned. In an atmosphere of mutual confidence, one and all luxuriate in the dramas. ‘Look, Margie, why don't you and Eddie go down to Bray together and straighten things out. Don't bother about your copy, we’ll see to that. Take the Friday off and don’t hurry back. Good-bye, darling, good luck. Have a divine time. Try and recapture things. . .’ And then, a few weeks later, the pound of flesh. ‘Oh, Marjorie, about that rise we were discussing. Really, I don’t see my way to putting it up to the directors just now. And after all, it’s not as if you didn’t have plenty of time off, is it?’ There are, even in the field of women’s papers, exceptional editors who are simple, companionable human beings, and I have been fortunate enough to work with such; but they are rarities. Usually, the cheaper the magazine, the more easy-going the routine, the less pretentious and competitive the staff and, inversely, the better the pay. For some of the lower middle group, who do not devote much thought to layout or art work, the nerve strain is much reduced. [Pocket-size: a wartime legacy — A crop of small-size magazines, imposed by paper restrictions, and welcomed for easy reading in shelters and works canteens, continues after the war as an established habit. Coloured photographs on the cover convey a sense of luxury without wasteful lavishness, clever typography builds up the effect of all that is implied in the word petite. The style follows the same pattern of littleness—‘a tiny disc of dental floss’, ‘a peek into your compact mirror’—and while the disagreeable habit or idea is not ignored, it is made less disagreeable by talking about it in baby terms.] Nothing about women’s magazines would be complete without something about the men who work on them. Apart from the big business managers, directors and others who remain in Olympian aloofness, there are the art editors—curiously enough, women very seldom shine in this category—the fashion artists and, before all the rest, the photographers. These gentlemen are usually of exquisite appearance, uncertain, coy and hard to please. They are masters of their craft, and let no one forget it. Nothing is too good for these gentlemen who sometimes look, and often behave, like overwrought prima donnas. They are a gossipy lot, but, considering their daily work, it is not surprising that they seem rather uninterested in women. They all live expensively in wittily furnished apartments. Some entertain lavishly, some are positively domesticated and love to potter about the kitchen and find relaxation in needlework. Their tantrums and temperamental idiosyncrasies rock the offices and studios. The toughest editors quail before them. (If he chooses to be difficult, and won’t retouch out at least half of Lady Billion’s hips, what is she going to say about letting us photograph her daughter’s coming-out ball at the Castle—it's got an eleventh century keep and we must put it into the Gracious Living Through The Centuries issue. . .) Whole pages are scrapped on the eve of press day, because the photographer has thought of a newer, better way to present the dresses. Underlings are sent scurrying all over town, looking for strange objects to decorate the scene. Layout and photographic backgrounds reflect each passing phase. During the heyday of surrealism, models were photographed on step-ladders, surrounded by boots, or were caught, apparently crashing through a sheet of frosted glass, quite unruffled. During the war, even stranger settings were devised. The models, in faultless tailored suits, were photographed picking their way over ruins that had been historic London (interesting for American issue, this) and captioned on ‘You can’t down fashion’ lines. Besides doing fashion work, the photographers take exclusive portraits of socialite and otherwise outstanding personalities—distinguished politicians, film stars, painters, sometimes visiting them in their own surroundings, a stately home, in the wings, or a cabin on the Queen Elizabeth. During the war, Cecil Beaton and Lee Miller, both members of Vogue’s staff and personalities quite apart from the general run of photographic prima donnas, covered an enormous amount of unlikely subjects which were reproduced in Vogue: submarines refuelling, airfields, battlefronts, prison camps, jungle warfare. Cecil Beaton ranged all the fronts from Africa to Burma for the Ministry of Information’s records, and Miss Miller went all over Europe with the American Army. Although there was, at first, a good deal of ironic comment when, Miss Miller turned up on the Normandy beaches and announced she was Vogue’s war correspondent, her subsequent reportages, both photography and writing, were of a quality which could stand up to any of the best Life reporters. The best staff photographers are always sent to Paris to report on the Dress Collections, where, on occasions, there are acid feuds between the resident staff and the visitors. They must travel about both at home and abroad to obtain fresh and authentic backgrounds for fashion pictures. A portfolio of sports clothes may be taken against the Welsh hills, or the Edinburgh skyline, beachwear at Antibes . . . Before the war, it was nothing for the photographer, fashion editor, two or three model girls and a dozen or more boxes of clothes to whisk off to Sweden or Lake Maggiore for a summer holiday number. New York papers send units down to Copocabana Beach or the Grand Canyon to have them pose, in colour, against a stark cactus and rock backcloth—The Golden Desert—and You. Tiger Tawny in Mattie Cannibal’s Golden Desert Uncrushable Crepe. Jewelled safety pins by Tartier. Golden Desert foundation cream by Hardenstein. Three advertisers—four, counting a mention that the models travelled by Trans-American Railways Inc.—having been satisfied, the business manager feels the trip was worth its enormous cost. But the underpaid copy writers and less favoured fashion artists are galled and feel it an unequal distribution of money. Although it must be admitted that the photographers are paid and cherished on a scale unknown to the rest of the organisation, it must also be admitted that the sumptuous brilliance of the most expensive women’s magazines is due, largely, to the photographic work. Without their eye-catching pages, I suspect the rest would sag. The day has not yet come when. women’s magazines read as well as they look. |
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