Adrian Mole's Vogue

Needless to say, I'm not a reader of Vogue. I'm the kind of person who reads about Vogue and similar magazines online and checks out their covers on Photoshop Disasters. At the same time I will stand by my one-time confession that I love women's magazines.

Why do I love them? They make me nostalgic after Communism. Of course, in a Good-bye, Lenin kind of way, because it's a fragmentary, deluded vision of Communism. (But still.)

The issues of Pani, Twój Styl, and Zwierciadło with which I stuff my suitcase after a visit in Poland are very different from Western glossies. Unlike the magazines Naomi Wolf describes in The Beauty Myth, the Polish ones did not result from a deal between plastic surgeons and fashion moguls. When they took off, the economic landscape was a lot like the first seconds of this excerpt from The IT Crowd.

In light of this paucity of beautification options, magazine makers assumed that women can read. Which is why until this day, despite the increasing amount of advertisements filling their pages, those mags still contain a considerable amount of text. So you get actual articles on politics, pains of modern society here and far away, interviews with writers and theater directors, painters, fabulous short essays -- all before you hit against the fashion spread and descriptions of cosmetics that cost at least half of your salary.

Maybe because I've been spoiled by these mags championing the assertion that women can process information and -- like the people in the reportage pieces -- may sometimes be poor and not dine in Manhattan or go to movie premieres, I can't take Vogue.

I got to this piece via Jezebel, probably something like a year after its publication, but as amazed as if it were hot off the press. Like the editor who covered this article on Jezebel I have absolutely no idea what the hairdo it's supposed to describe looks like, even though I think I've seen it in pictures.

The most fascinating thing about this piece though is that it sounds like it was written by Sue Townsend: it's like a scene from a yet non-existent new Adrian Mole volume, in which Adrian gets a job at a women's magazine and, trying hard to figure out a topic fit for ladies, he ends up writing nonsense about hair.

In the book Adrian would get fired for this kind of crap, but in the real world Vogue this runs smoothly and this does not come across as an insult to intellect. How strange.

My naive thought, from which I was cured when I read up more on the writer on Jezebel, was that it really was Sue Townsend writing under a pseudonym. Or at least a major fan of British satirical novels.

Wouldn't it be wonderfully postmodern if Plum Sykes consciously parodied herself in a Sue Townsend style?!

Unfortunately, Sykes has probably never heard of Townsend, probably has no sense of humor, And on top of it all I would not be able to find her piece in an actual issue of Vogue among all the photoshopped adverts of perfume, jewelry, and nose jobs.

I know there's yet another movie about Anna Wintour but I'd personally prefer to find out who the actual Vogue readership is and what brings them to read such inanities and not think it's a postmodern satire.