Eye Weekly Article Slams American Vogue For Putting Halle Berry On The Cover Of The September Issue!
City Style
The September Issue review — Part 2
Which of this season’s glossies make the grade?
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BY Sarah Nicole Prickett August 13, 2010 13:08
Grade: C-
What Vogue.com has done is figure out how to use that world-wide-webby thing to post a slideshow of their past 10 September [insert Candy Pratts Price v/o: “the Jahhnuary of fashion”] covers, just so we can be reassured that all of them were not only not-black, but also not any shade darker than a St. Tropez tan. OMG, bloggable news: Vogue is an ivory dinosaur. So Halle Berry gets to be what, the fourth black woman ever to cover Vogue, and the second-ever on the September Issue? But she doesn’t get to have black hair! ‘Cause that would somehow be scarier than this airbrushed-a-hundred-times-per-night Louise Brooks bob?
Congratulations, Halle, I guess.
Grade: A-
“This shoot captures where she’s at [sic] right now, I think,” says Dazed senior fashion editor Katie Shillingford of cover girleen Dakota Fanning. “A beautiful young starlet!” OK! This is why, if senior fashion editors seem too cool to talk to you, you should maybe just be grateful. Mark Segal’s black-and-white portrait is a beautiful cover, though not at all young, because neither is Dakota Fanning. It’s more — and I shudder to use this word, but — timeless. Too soon for that? At least they didn’t make her look like Little J, as NYLON would’ve, or as she does in the movie she’s promoting, The Runaways, which apparently is just now being released in the UK. Apologies to the UK, then. But claps for Dazed. As much as I want Dakota to quit staring languidly, knowingly, into the empty recesses of my soul, I just can’t quit staring back.
Elle US, starring Julia Roberts
Grade: C+
Elle has a trio of Julia covers to celebrate Eat Pray Love, and one out of three ain’t bad. The Oscar close-up cover, all grey-lit and pensive, has the painterly quality of a pre-bankruptcy Leibovitz. No clothes are visible. Her arms are folded, and you can actually see the folds at her shoulders, where the Photoshoppers have been kind enough not to strip away the bits of flesh. Her face, of course, has been polished to the smoothness of a newborn pebble. She’s not old, but come on. She’s laughed before. In the cover story, Roberts has a wicked quote about plastic surgery and actresses — “Your face tells a story… and it shouldn’t be a story about your drive to the doctor’s office” — and maybe it would’ve been nice if someone on staff had read it.
Grade: A-
Russh is the down-under, downtown girl’s fashion mag, a mag so gorgeous and wild and free of spirit and generally magic that it erases from memory all the terrible half-human Australian “dudes” you’ve ever met and makes you just wanna be there. Right. Now. The covers of Russh don’t mean anything, or promote anything, or really even say anything. They’re just wet, wild fantasy. And sometimes you need that. Here is Alessandra Ambrosio — what a gods-given name! — and when she looks at this cover, even she will wish she were her.
Grade: A
This September issue is the stepping-out of Stefano Tonchi, who skipped from T magazine to W this past spring (U and V were apparently not happy). It is, as it had to be, a whole new W: forward-leaning, witty, wise, insouciantly beautiful, and — look at that winking “Great Expecations” cover line — self-aware. Or maybe just… aware. Given the coagulating bluebloodedness of the former W, that’s enough of a start. Tonchi isn’t putting models back on top; he’s not gunning for Vogue. Instead, with his eight-woman-strong “Young Hollywood” issue, he shames Vanity Fair in the most awesome possible way. You remember: VF took a bunch of young, thin, white girls and made them look somehow more the same, all in fusty pastels and prep-handbook looks, like so many princesses of Pleasantville. They put in Joan Holloway and not Gabourey Sidibe. It was disgusting. Now here’s W, the richiest of richie-rich rags, stepping boldly into this millennium. Of the eight actresses, all of them are interesting and even distinguishable from the others. A whole two — Zoe Kravitz and Yaya Dacosta — are black. And they get to keep their hair. W for the win.
P.S.: So the cover story was penned by the delightfully poisonous Lynn Hirschberg, but don’t fret for Jennifer Lawrence. Girl was smart enough to bite into a tuna melt at the fateful lunch hour. There’s no making fun of a tuna melt.
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