I’ve been exploring the question of whether magazines have always been propaganda. I think it’s safe to say that the answer is YES.
At the very least, they are a very convenient meme vector for propagandists such as Edward Bernays, the inventor of PR and nephew of Sigmund Freud. He pioneered the “hall of mirrors” technique by orchestrating an “environment of consent” around his products. This included pitching a different “exclusive” story to all the different women’s magazines.
Schizophyllum Commune
Some days I’m productive. Some days I get lost in research. Some days I spend way to much time trying to decide if I’m an INTP like I always thought or if I’m an Ni-Ti INFJ instead, which would make sense given my predilection to symbolic thinking and getting overwhelmed under a sea of intuition. None of it really matters, except not knowing bothers me greatly. I’ve mostly made my piece with not knowing my exact IQ, but personality….
Perhaps this is a case of “if you can’t understand the world, try understanding yourself instead.” Or, it’s just me avoiding doing the work.
» If you are concerned with truth and are at all into fairies, conspiracy theories involving aliens, or hallucinogens of any flavor, run—do not walk—and read Owen Cyclops’ observations on demons. I’m not kidding.
» Hello, this is me trying to psyche myself up again, but: How to Make Money Online Starting Today
So, people always bend the knee. People often take the path of least resistance. Corporate PR is used for both purposes, to show Power that the corporation recognizes its authority. It’s no coincidence that WokeCapital’s bio has read “Speaking Power to Truth, one tweet at a time”. That’s all that’s going on there, really. And recognizing that Power lies on the Left, and not on the Right, corporations take advantage of this asymmetry. You can never go wrong by signaling too far left, but you can afford to piss off righties, who have near zero cultural, political, or legal power. Just note how they go after Trump, who is ostensibly CEO of the country, when he rocks the boat!
» The retro-future is now: Bitcoin has been transmitted via HAM radio
» Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters
“It’s all about learning who your supporter base is,” said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst of the NPD Group and the author of “Why Customers Do What They Do,” in an interview during the 2016 campaign. “How do they live? What are their trigger points? What words resonate with them? It’s worth its weight in gold, in the political arena just like the consumer arena. We call it demographic profiling, because voter profiling sounds like a dirty word, but that’s what it is.”
Fashion profiling is another facet of this approach, using data analysis to identify the way brands are perceived — and it should not come as a surprise to anyone.
Assessing value systems, and goals and priorities, via the clothes people wear has been a part of professional life for years. The “dress for the job you want” adage is an expression of fashion profiling. Calling someone a “Gucci person” or a “Celine person” is fashion profiling; opting for Levi’s over Rag & Bone makes a statement about associations and history and opens one up to fashion profiling — albeit in a manner that generally leaves much unsaid. Cambridge Analytica preyed on that human reality via algorithm, using data from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission.
» I haven’t listened to this podcast so I cannot endorse, but I’m intrigued: The Mysterious 1965 Death of Dorothy Kilgallen
» How to Break 5 Soul-Sucking Technology Habits
» Italian Vanity Fair looks to be doing some interesting things. I’m taking notes.
“We don’t have to close ourselves to our golden tower,” he said. “In Italy, we are living an era of populism and I can see the suffering of big newspapers because they are closing themselves into a very niche and snobbish explanation of reality.” He views the “simplification of complexity” as the opposite of that populist movement. “Philosophy can be very pop.”
Marchetti describes his strategy for Vanity Fair Italia as an “opera in three acts.” The first priority is online content, where he wants to publish exclusive songs, videos and content that will hopefully be newsworthy. “The goal is to become the center of the conversation in our country,” he said.
Next comes Wednesday’s print issue, which he has redesigned with creative director Massimo Pitis to have a more collectible, independent magazine aesthetic. It’s an approach he said he’s learned from fashion brands like Gucci: just because something is intended for wide audiences doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have the sophistication of a niche product. And the third act represents his ambitions for events.
» Crispin Glover asks a bunch of questions.
» I have a soft spot for Marc Jacobs because we share gut-ailment experiences, and sometimes you just need to read some good fashion writing.
Enjoy the YouTube recs now because I’m giving it up for Lent this year….
After so much wondering about the sincerity of fashion magazines, and magazines in general, I decided that it’s time to step up myself.
So I made a zine!
>>> You can download it here: Batfort Zine – Photo Manipulation <<<
To answer my question, yes magazines are propaganda. They are glamour. They exist in the space between “what is” and “what we hope for” (and frankly, they wallow in and widen that space).
The problem is they do not necessarily help us get from where we are to where we want to be.
This article (“Start a 1-acre, Self-Sufficient Homestead“) is republished by Mother Earth News 2+ times per year, and has been for a decade or more.
Why?
Because the dirty little secret of how-to magazines is that they are not instruction guides, they are tools for guided dreaming.
I’ve advertised in them (when I read http://Smartflix.com ), and talked to their ad sales people
They’re very forthright, and explain that their readers are “aspirational”.
There’s an argument that the reason that people play the lottery is not rational expectations, but buying an opportunity to dream.
Related, the reason people buy Mother Earth News and all the other homesteading magazines is because it gives them enough data to give their dreams a patina of realism. Same reason Lucas Films puts greebles and exhaust marks on spaceships.
Doesn’t make them real.
…but when you dream about living on a small self sufficient farm, and you can picture it with an old tractor that you’ve greased the zerk fittings on, it’s a BETTER, HIGHER QUALITY dream.
In 1970s and 1980s folks talked about Star Wars, Blade Runner as “lived in futures”
So Mother Earth News, etc. give you a “lived in future” for yourself. Instead of just thinking “in 10 years maybe we’ll live on a farm”, you think “in 10 years maybe we’ll live on a 3 acre farm with an old Ford tractor and some Buff Orppington chickens”.
Much more “real”.
But notice the difference between the PATINA of a lived in future, and an ACTUAL future.
The patina is painted on the surface, and it doesn’t need to actually work, it just needs to LOOK real, not BE real.
This creates selective pressure for the types of articles that are written and – PRAISE GNON! – this is the kind of article we get.
Which sells better? “Live debt free on 4 acres” or “Hobby farming is very hard and very expensive”?
You know the answer.
Now, with this in mind, go to the newsstand and look at all the farm LARP magazines. Every headline on the cover, & every article inside matches the template I just laid out.
(Go read the rest of the tweetstorm, especially if you’re a city person interested in starting a farm.)
This tells us two things. Probably more, but let’s focus on two.
I used to be a magazine addict. I loved magazines, especially fashion magazines, especially weird or foreign fashion magazines. One of the reasons that I quit buying them (other than money), is that I started to think about how little value they added to my life. Yes, the pictures were pretty and I enjoyed posting some on my wall, and I liked the entertainment factor—but in terms of actually advancing my life, nothing.
During this time, I found that it was more satisfying to look at super-high-end fashion—couture—than it was to look at “regular people” fashion. Couture I knew I would never be able to afford, so I just enjoyed looking at it for art’s sake. The “regular people” fashion presented clothes to me that I would fall in love with, but couldn’t quite afford. It always left a bad taste in my mouth, because I found the perfect bag/shoe/coat to no avail.
Both types of magazines left a gap between what I was looking at and my actual life. One was large and expansive, and 100% fantasy—fun. The other was small
So how can we turn this to our advantage? How can the dream-gap work for me instead of against me?
Dream with details. Details make everything more powerful. The more realistic something is, the more it sticks in your brain (think about cartoon violence vs live-action) and part of that is the details. You’ll always viscerally remember how something smelled, or a specific texture during a significant moment.
It always struck me that Tony Robbins corrects people who say you should think about your greatest moments as a way to create a positive vision for yourself. No, he said on a James Altucher podcast, you should relive that moment. Mentally put yourself back there and experience all the little details. That, more than anything, will wake up your brain and give you the feeling of success that you’re after.
If you’re going to dream “realistically,” actually take the actions to do the things you’re dreaming. Otherwise, dream insane and dream big. Then your dreams will never fail you.
And certainly don’t count on magazines to get you where you want to go.
For a long time now, I’ve considered starting an indie fashion magazine. This is because the fashion magazine I want to read doesn’t actually exist.
And really, it would be more than a fashion magazine. It would be a style magazine.
I don’t want to read propaganda. I don’t want to read something that will tell me what to wear or think or watch or read or buy. I want a magazine that will get me to think, that will offer depth, the “why” of things.
At first, I thought this magazine could be a stripped-down, low-fi affair. No stylists, no photoshop, just real women. Darling magazine is already doing that.
Yet while I’m 100% happy that Darling is doing their thing, it’s not the magazine that I crave. It’s polished and clean, and based out of LA. I’m looking for something darker, willing to dig for things, more like a carpet of leaves on a forest floor.
No to succulents, yes to ferns and mushrooms.
Back then, even when I imagined this magazine, I couldn’t conceptualize how one would go about running or financing such an endeavor. Now that I’ve been sniffing around the indie publishing scene for a while, I have a better idea of how that would work.
And of course, the timing of this blog post is brought to you by synchronicity in the simulation: a random retweet of a 2015 article on indie fashion magazines on Business of Fashion.
Many indies still rely on traditional advertising, which is a good reminder that often fashion people just want things to look prettier—not be all that different.
The most obvious revenue stream available to titles is the cover price of the magazine. “It has been my number one rule here that we never ever sold a magazine at a loss,” said Masoud Golsorkhi, founder and editor-in-chief of Tank magazine, an innovatively-designed, ideas-focused, independent fashion title. “If we couldn’t rely on copy revenue, I would just close shop immediately,” he continued.
This model could be facilitated for niche publications by crowdsourcing websites like Kickstarter and Indie-go-go. It’s working for sci-fi journals—why couldn’t it work for another genre?
Other magazines capitalize on the publisher-as-retailer format (the exact opposite of content marketing, I suppose):
A number of independent publications, including Inventory and Kinfolk, a quarterly magazine based in Portland that celebrates the ‘slow lifestyle’ and features contemporary illustrations, charming photography and intimate interviews with creatives, have also been able to leverage their brand and point of view as curators of products, tapping transactional revenue by setting up online and brick and mortar stores.
Really it’s the same endgame as content marketing, just starting from a different side. A really high-end merch store. The more I think about it, the more that the publisher-retailer dualism seems to be the most viable way to sustain an operation online. Advertisers are fickle, platforms like YouTube are fickle, and right now even payment providers are fickle (see also: PayPal deplatforming InfoWars), but an group of people who support your cause—those people can’t be bought.
Other funding models seem to follow standard ways to make money online: advertising, consultancies, sponsorships, etc.
Finally, an observation on the increasing rarity of printed magazines:
“Paper is a luxury material and I think that consuming our magazine is a luxurious experience. It is very different from the way that you engage with online content,” said Martin, who said that working in print builds a different, more desirable relationship with readers than online. “It extends to things like the quality of the photography and the production and the way it is graphically designed — it’s a very time-consuming operation, which extends to the way we want to engage with our readers.”
There is something to be said for this—the luxuriousness—but also the exclusivity. It’s how Ben Settle runs his copywriting empire. The best stuff is in the hard-copy-only format.
I have too many ideas for projects at all times, but this one makes me hmmmmmmmm a little bit hmm-er.
This is how I know I’m getting older: I have now watched a graphic design style slide from the indie to the cool kids to the normies.
Obviously this has happened many times in history, but it was a notable moment in my own history when I stood in line at the co-op and thought to myself, That’s strange, I’ve seen that design before.
But enough of a weirdo generalist introduction. Let’s talk about magazines.
Taste of Home. It’s not a sexy magazine, or something that’s after the hot new trend. It’s a solid magazine for solid people. I think the appeal in the grocery store checkout is for moms who don’t want to think up what to cook for dinner. It’s a magazine that has a real purpose, but not much excitement.
It used to look like this:
Now that I’m learning more about copywriting and sales letters, this magazine looks like a magazine-sized visual sales letter. Bright colors, enticing taglines, the number of things you’ll find inside that is inevitably a lie (even Vogue does this). Just trying to sell more copies at the checkout, ma’am.
The design reminds me of the blocky titles of the 90s but updated with the “we can never capitalize a word, ever” attitude from the early 2000s.
Ok, but here’s the thing. Now Taste of Home looks like this:
The title has morphed into a compact logo and the lines are much cleaner. Instead of a tableaux of food and color, we have one featured dish on a plain background. The type is simple (although not simple enough imo) and even has a hint (but not too much!!1) of a handwritten feel.
Now where have I seen this magazine cover before?
Hmm.
Hmmmmmmmm.
I trust you can spot the visual similarities. This particular issue is from 2008, around the time of BA’s design update. I was a subscriber at the time, and the teardrop motif was big for a while until they started phasing in handwriting.
Points to Taste of Home for skipping directly to the handwriting trend, although it doesn’t look like there’s any actual handwriting on that cover.
I really liked this era of BA. The magazine was clean and fun, they used some visual storytelling techniques as a result of the clean design, and there were really good ideas for recipes and parties. Part of me wishes I hadn’t unsubscribed, but I moved a couple times and then I started eating only meat. No need for recipes that involve vegetables, so it wasn’t a priority.
So imagine my surprise when I found a BA at my local co-op the other day, looking like this:
(Actually, wait, first I should tell you that I was big into indie and alt magazines for a while. There’s a great local cigar shop in Portland that stocks magazines from all over the world. That’s why I recognized these design elements.)
Look at this. It’s like Kinfolk (the food) mated with The Gentlewoman (the design). Blocky type. Heavy underlines. Lots of framing devices. Negative space. Freeform typesetting. The only thing missing is Millennial Pink ™. Did I mention negative space?
Like literally this same cover was on the newstand. No taglines. No promises. No nothing. I’m interested to see how that works out. Maybe some simplicity is called for now that the expected magazine is gasping its last breath.
(After a while, I made myself stop buying magazines because I felt like the content/money ratio wasn’t good enough. I can get better facts, narrative, and motivation from the internet, although I do miss the glossy pictures that I could tear out and put on my walls.)
We shall end with my favorite edition of The Gentlewoman, featuring the ever-awesome Angela Lansbury wearing the ever-problematic Terry Richardson’s glasses. This is the one with the blocky type, the framing, and – yes – the pink.
The Gentlewoman is one of those magazines that reacts against the “fast/cheap/short” model of magazine journalism by doing long-form interviews with badass ladies and lots of minimalist-traditional fashion. Always a little too rich for my blood, but I appreciated how they talked to actual real women who work for a living. It was the “cool” fashion magazine, the kind that eventually make their way into Anthropologie stores because of their good aesthetics.
Is The Gentlewoman in danger of losing its spot at the top of the design food chain? BA is nipping at its heels.
My instinct says that there’s a new offroad thinking-woman’s fashion magazine in town, but I don’t know what it is.
If you have any idea of what that might be, please let me know.
And if so, do you want to?
I’ve decided to seriously pursue the magazine idea. I’ve wanted a non-leftist style-type magazine for as long as I can remember, one that is focused on truth and beauty and actual real ways that actual real people live their lives. Everyday glamour, maybe.
Pretty much the opposite of the “aspirational” paged of Vogue, but with crossover for a lot of content.
Darling has made a good start.
But I also miss the irreverence brought by Sassy and Jane. It’s never worth treating the fashion and beauty industry with too much seriousness.
I’d also like to see a magazine that addresses issues in my own life. How to be a red-pilled gal in a blue-pilled world. How to gracefully tell your hostess that, sorry, you don’t eat food that grew from the ground. How to reconcile your love of pretty shoes with the functionality of the Vibram 5-fingers.
(Don’t get me started on the Vibrams that are designed to have shoe-like design details. Blech.)
I don’t know what that magazine would look like, but I’d like to find out.
So to start, I’m going to take a look at the history, structure, and content of other successful ladies magazines.
First up: the Ladies’ Home Journal.
Remember how recently I went on a giant rant about magazines basically being propaganda?
What I didn’t realize was that magazines have always been this way.
At the turn of the 20th century, the magazine published the work of muckrakers and social reformers…. During World War II, it was a particularly favored venue of the government for messages intended for homemakers…. In March of 1970, feminists held an 11-hour sit-in at the Ladies’ Home Journal‘s office, which resulted in them getting the opportunity to produce a section of the magazine that August.
Magazines: telling you what to buy and what to think since the steam-powered printing press.
So my question is: can you have a non-propagandic magazine? Would someone read such a publication?
Or is a magazine simply a physical manifestation of our desire to believe in something?
Vox Day, of all people, brought the regime change at British Vogue to my attention once again. Edward Enninful is purging white girls from the payroll (quelle surprise). On the one hand, it’s immensely satisfying to watch the predictable world of fashion “journalism” get shaken up in such a big way. On the other hand, I don’t have a lot of faith that British Vogue will continue to create beautiful, compelling content. Not that I’ve been reading many fashion magazines lately; I made myself stop reading them a while back because they didn’t contribute anything to my life.
But that doesn’t stop me from binging on digital fashion content every now and again. To that end, searching for a citation for my newly-updated my About page, I found myself down the rabbit hole of short fashion documentaries on YouTube. Some of the things that stand out to me in fashion documentaries never make their way online, which frustrates me. (What I’m realizing is that’s where I should act, instead of merely complaining about it.)
Anyhow, look! Enninful makes an appearance in The September Issue (a documentary about American Vogue), getting coached on assertiveness by Grace Coddington. Looks like that training paid off.
In another decision to hire a non-old non-white person to run a fashion magazine, Eva Chen became the youngest editor-in-chief of a Conde Nast publication when she was appointed to run Lucky magazine in 2013. However, Lucky didn’t last much longer (and it was kind of boring, tbh–I wanted to like it, but it always felt more like a catalog than a magazine).
Wintour brought in Chen in 2013 to bring Lucky into the digital age. Chen was young, highly visible through her social media presence, and brought an approachable cool factor to the magazine. She took a high-low approach, featuring unknown fashion bloggers in the magazine’s pages while recruiting expensive, upscale stylists like Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele and legendary photographers like Patrick Demarchelier.
That upgrade came at a cost. The pages were beautiful, but some say that the price points alienated readers who were used to more affordable clothes they could grab off the racks. The publication still slumped in circulation and newsstand sales were even worse. The turnaround flagged.
“It was too late, and she wasn’t given a chance, given a dead animal,” a source from Lucky magazine said in defense of Chen on the condition of anonymity.
Now, I really liked Chen’s work when she wrote for Teen Vogue back in the day. But it’s clear that, despite being hired on to a sinking ship, her decisions contributed to the fall of Lucky instead of turning them around. She brought the Vogue-style aspirational mindset to a magazine that most people bought for an anti-Vogue outlook. Not a winning combination.
Maybe that was all her. Maybe that was her being overly influenced by Anna Wintour, since she’s young and didn’t have Grace Coddington’s tough skin (Coddington was known for standing up to Wintour).
Maybe it’s because Chen have the savvy that Wintour does. Anna Wintour cultivates glamour in her job. Chen goes out of her way to be the “everygirl.”
Compare and contrast:
The sunglasses. Pre-selected questions that carefully cultivate her image as a patron of the arts, not merely a fashion girl. Cameos that reinforce her exalted status.
Now, Chen has somewhat of a disadvantage because this video is produced by Forbes rather than Conde Nast (which has a major stake in making Anna Wintour look good). However, Chen herself goes out of her way to try to “break the fashion industry stereotypes.” She focuses on approachability, rather than Wintour, who focuses on aspiration.
Like Eva Chen, it is interesting to note that Enninful falls on the approachable end of the fashion spectrum. We’ll see how things shake out at British Vogue.
© 2024 Batfort
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
Recent Comments