Have I said I love magazine covers? Esquire’s May 2008 magazine reimagines the 1965 cover that pictured Italian actress Virna Lisi, in town filming Assault on a Queen with Frank Sinatra. Shaving. In the magazine shoot, not the film.
The story in Esquire is told by the art director at the time, George Lois, who they say “created some of the most memorable covers in the magazine’s history”. Lois’s commentary is stark about the mercantile pressures he felt at the time (but got away from):
“The ad guys hated it. It was too edgy. They were worried about losing clients.”
In the recently released 2nd edition of The Magazine from Cover to Cover, Sammye Johnson and Patricia Prijatel focus on the same point: “how much influence advertisers have on the editorial content and the variety of means by which they exert their power.” One of my Level 2 magazine journalism students who’s doing some good features is also doing some work experience with a magazine over in Liverpool. He had an eye-opener the other day, when
he sat in on his first editorial meeting. “Do the ad team always have control like that?!” he asked. Why, yes they do.
I’m intrigued about the resonance that a magazine cover has when it pastiches, parodies, copies, morphs, etc, another image, either a previous magazine cover, or another famous marque or image. For example, the outcry over the recent Time Green cover and its pastiche of the famous Marines putting up the US flag at Iwo Jima.
Here, the two Esquire magazines are not so different: two women shaving, an image that was originally inspired by a 1965 article on the ‘masculinization of the American woman’. (Haven’t read the article).
There are a couple of obvious differences. I would imagine far less resistance from advertising, as gender roles have become less fixed. More body in 2008. More of a cover lines to sell the magazine (although still only one) and an interesting, self-reflexive one. I think the text is important here: “We shot this image to catch your eye so you will pick up this issue and immerse yourself in the most [missing] story you will read this year.” I will have to go and buy this tomorrow and update the word I can’t quite make out. But interesting for me, at least, are two points: i) the editorial team are no longer so confident selling the magazine just on the image, and I wonder if the fact they are drawing on a 43-year-old idea had some play in that? And ii) the self-reflexivity of the magazine’s commercial status is now made explicit. It’s selling point is its selling point, more than the model.
However, having said that, what hasn’t changed is that white and blonde sells magazines. The only problem the ad guys had in 1965 was that the woman was shaving, entering the male realm (but still under the gaze). As Premier Model Management boss Carole White said in the Independent yesterday, the British magazine industry’s progressive senses of the 1980s, when magazine covers were multicultural, have gone into reverse. The ideal is now white or bust (literally). To quote:
“Whenever I ask the question, it’s always about sales and the idea that blue eyes and blonde hair sells. I’m not sure I believe that. If fashion editors were a bit braver and tried out black, Asian and Chinese models, our eyes would be easier on that look. They don’t give the opportunities to these girls. Given that there are so many variations of skin, particularly in London, it’s a backward step being taken if no one is brave enough to give ethnic girls a chance.”
So, not much has changed according to White. I’d like to see some quantitative analysis of this, but I’d imagine she may be right. Advertising is the government of magazine sales in the commercial world. Nothing new there. But when magazines do have such resonance as cultural artefacts, as producers of cultural meaning around gender and race, in particular, then their treatment or mirroring of other cultural nodal points, areas of moments of meaning that are created through the reinforcement of a specific message about race, gender, identity, subjectivity (not my areas of expertise), then the echo from previous images seems to make the message more forceful.
One more example. This story in the Guardian a few weeks ago about the cover of US Vogue and its treatment of the black US basketball star LeBron James, through its apparent parody of a King Kong poster (thanks to DanaLana):
Popularity: 16% [?]
