Magazines: nostalgia/actual degeneration

Jezebel did a story on comparing two May issues of Elle magazine: one from 1986, one from 2010. Conclusions:

1) freckles vs Photoshopped poreless mannequins on the cover

2) interview + photos of people who look directly into the camera vs celebrities as substitute models

3) actually doable fashion trends relevant to everyone

4) 'playfulness and spark' + diversity vs clinically beautiful, thinner, 'somber'

5) shoots look like actual fun, models show less body and are still sexy vs vamping it up big time

6) obligatory desert shoot

7) women appear stronger, sassier, 'aggressive, energetic, fierce, forces to be reckoned with' vs just not the same "oopmh."

It's really quite shocking to notice most of these things really are true. You can argue about the powerful images of women, picking different shoots of different clothes, and that's manipulatable to a large extent, but with some stuff, like the excessive Photoshopping, thinner models, and surprisingly, even the lack of diversity today (I would have never guessed there would be more black models and redheads in a 1986 shoot) - you kinda just have to acknowledge there is some disturbing degeneration going on. Obviously, this comparison is a random sample, but it got me thinking - were we really closer to something more real and "better" 25 years ago? If so, what the fuck?

Looking at these scans, I get an obvious wackier vibe from the older ones, and sleazier vibe from the new ones. Like all the on-the-verge-of-embarrassing clothes and attitudes were polished to some slick and shiny outcome. There is so much talk about an 80s revival, and it's been around for so long, so it's natural we see these blasts from the past and go 'aww, so cute!', but thinking about it from Jezebel's perspective, we're more like '80s - you're doing it wrong'. There is something very natural with looking at contemporary stuff and it feeling quite normal, while older things instantly seeming dated and a bit funny, if not downright ridiculous. But the fact that magazines used to print women pulling silly faces, and not the kind of faux-sexy post-myspace faces, but actual ones, wacky or smiling or serious faces - that's kind of a bomb filled with nostalgia for something that seems to have actually happened.

Still, it sounds a bit too good to be true. Everything that suggests something of the past was better than its contemporary equivalent (or lack thereof) inspires my instant suspicion. It's not even a thing of memory, because memory is selective and mutable (as I learned from the film Waltz with Bashir, people would recognize themselves on fake childhood photos and recall the day/place/their feelings). Nostalgia is what contemporary culture depends on, as we go through series and series of reworkings and revivals. On the one hand, there is this gigantic push towards the new, undiscovered, and constantly updated, but on the other, the reliance on things past is so enormous it never fails to blow my mind (at a young age, the first time I saw Pink Floyd: The Wall, I could not get my head around the fact it was still about World War 2. Since then, I've been ever so vigilant of anything modern really being about distant past). There's a disturbing certainty in many people that any piece of shit coming from the 50s/60s/70s/80s/90s is astronomically better than anything produced in the last 10 years. Of course, very often these assertions are based on more than just age, but it only makes it harder to catch yourself falling for one bogus argumentation or the other. There's something extremely annoying about always looking back and digesting for the millionth time what trash or treasure was spewed out before you were born. But then again, like with this 1986/2010 Elle comparison, sometimes it's hard not to believe we used to have it better, and somewhere along they way totally fucked up.


Vintage magazine nostalgia is rife on the internet, with all manners of sites putting up aged Vogue scans or whatever. Most of it is a question of aesthetics (or the annoying retroer-than-thou contest), but another place where actual debate is signalled is some recent posts on Style Rookie about a 90s teen magazine, Sassy. A commenter describes the magazine as one that 'treat[ed] teenage girls like intelligent, capable, interesting people.' It wrote about serious stuff and playful stuff, feminist issues and teen problems, clothes and makeup as well as sex and prom. For crying out loud, it had a Thurston Moore advice column, which must be the best thing ever. It printed reader's comments, made fun of stuff, including itself, but it was not sickeningly meta-self-ironic like some idiotic magazines today that also pretend to cover serious issues while being playful and sexy at the same time. Needless to say, I'm much more attracted to Sassy than I am to Vice, despite never reading a full issue of either.

All scans from Style Rookie.

Sassy is also a subject of a full-length publication, How Sassy Changed My Life, by Marisa Meltzer, who is also an expert on Girl Power.



Is it nostalgia for something impossible that I never had? Partly, maybe. But mostly, I can't help but agree with Style Rookie's Tavi that 'popular culture has gotten to a point where you have both the Disney superstar and the ~quirky~ outsider rooting for, trying to be, and promoting the nerdy underdog. And when everyone is the nerdy underdog, no one is the nerdy underdog.' And I believe women suffer from this cretinous double-standard loads. Not out of nostalgia, but out of real feeling, I wish today's magazines were more like the 1986s Elle or Generation X Sassy: fun, relevant magazines for girls and women that don't patronize and Photoshop them into skinny shiny contorted "independent" standardized fit-ins, but celebrate as diverse, intelligent and interesting people, with a range of attitudes, hobbies and problems, who are brave and honest and not afraid to be a bit out there and risk being mocked by people for being "overly politically correct", "too serious", "too childish", "too New Age", "too feminist", or whatever bullshit. A magazine to identify with and relate to!

It would be interesting to see what happened in magazines at those times in Poland, where I grew up - I know for a fact that both aesthetically and content-wise, the publications that were available in '86 or '92 were distinctly different from what this post cites. With both my mother and I being avid fans of the printed press, and rarely throwing our pages away - summer excavation project ahead!