Magazines: The Fashion Beat

With a “College Board” of some 1,500 girls who spend their spare time contributing news of campus fads and fashions, the fashion magazine Mademoiselle may well boast one of the largest unpaid reportorial staffs in the publishing world. The only reward for correspondents comes each spring, when 20 of the comeliest and most conscientious are entertained and photographed in New York and then packed off for a week’s gaiety in Europe.

Mademoiselle’s companion magazine Glamour also imports vacationing collegians to help promote the August college issue—though Glamour’s girls are selected solely on the basis of their clothes and looks. Seventeen, which rounds off the trio of major young women’s fashion magazines, organizes the teen-agers from a distance: it publishes their complaints, tips, yearnings, short stories and book reviews.

On the face of it, the magazines seem to be going out of their way to report the changing tastes of the clothes-conscious college girl. But what clothes do the girls choose? More often than not, they select what the magazines have already selected for them. The process is less the profession of journalism than it is the practice of marketing. “The fashion editor never puts a line on paper,” says Barbara Kerr, the astute managing editor of Mademoiselle. “Sometimes she can scarcely read.” Every editor has her beat (evening dress, lingerie, shoes), and she spends most of her time hobnobbing with manufacturers to discover new styles she thinks may catch on. Periodically, samples are piled up in a conference room and scrutinized. The editors mince no words as they cast baleful eyes on the goods: “Oh, no,” “Ghastly,” “How horrible.” Often they suggest one less button or one more pleat. Eventually, they winnow out the styles that appeal to them; then go off to persuade manufacturers to make the changes and stores to stock the clothes. Since the merchandise cannot be shown in the magazine until the stores are lined up, the editors often become as aggressive as any Seventh Avenue salesman.

Cigar with Boots. While Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar are still the sophisticated pacesetters in the adult fashion world, offering far-out styles at far-out prices, the three younger magazines appeal to an ever-growing group of less well heeled but just as clothes-conscious younger women. Today the trio of magazines is fatter than ever and report record advertising revenues.

Mademoiselle, which made its debut in 1935, and Glamour, launched in 1939, were brought under the same roof in 1959 by the ubiquitous publisher Sam Newhouse, who owns a controlling interest in both, as well as in Vogue, which he gave to his wife as a 35th anniversary present. Despite common ownership, the two magazines compete earnestly. With a circulation of 635,000, Mademoiselle is the more venturesome of the two, featuring the more avant-garde clothes on the more awkwardly posed models. “They have been criticized for being beat,” says New York Times Fashion Editor Pat Peter son, “and then all of a sudden that look is everywhere.” Glamour, on the other hand, offers more down-to-earth fashions for a wider readership of 1,226,000, “Like we would not show a girl in a bathing suit at the shore with a cigar in her mouth, and boots,” says Glamour’s Editor in Chief Kathleen Casey.

Seventeen features pubescent models and a coy vocabulary. With a little effort, the magazine contends, any ugly duckling can end up with a “dream dress,” a “dream complexion,” a “dream date.” In the language of the trade, Seventeen is a “how-to” magazine; it tells how to cook shish kebab, how to jazz up a bedroom, how to avoid going too far with a boy friend.

Advice from Men. Although they focus on fashion, the magazines are not content merely to clothe a girl; they want to improve her across the board. To this end, they run articles on the latest fads and campus rebellions. Outside columnists weigh in with portentous advice: Peter Sellers tells how to create the real self; Dr. Albert Ellis tells how to pick up a man in a ladylike fashion. The magazines run fiction of a sort that delicately explores feminine sensibilities, authors ranging from Truman Capote to Irwin Shaw.

All of the magazines carry a column of intimate advice written by a man. Glamour features a columnist anonymously known as Jake, a job that has changed hands many times and is now held down by a smooth-tongued advertising man in his early 30s. Mademoiselle runs the team of David Newman, a freelance writer, and Robert Benton, an artist, who recently warned readers: “You must remember men are attracted to Superwomen, but they fall in love with Women-Women.” Seventeen’s Jimmy Wescott (“In the fashion world, mules are something a girl wears and fellows act like”) is billed as a teenager. “We want the readers to think Jimmy is a teen-age boy,” says Managing Editor Jean Wright, “when of course we couldn’t use a teen-age boy because he wouldn’t be good enough.”

Dark Green Chic. The ideal woman, as she emerges from the pages of the fashion magazines, combines fashion with journalistic flair, beauty with chic; the staffers rather desperately try to live up to such perfection, and the magazines like to dwell, a trifle narcissistically, on their own staffs. Mademoiselle recently described the office of Editor in Chief Betsy Blackwell: “Dark green, warmly cluttered with antiques, and softly lighted by a crystal chandelier, the bower exudes the feminine yet decisive personality of its occupant.” Some of Glamour’s editors model for the magazine as well as edit; the most successful of these, Gloria Steinem, 30, has been the subject of many Glamour articles: her college career, her parties, her clothes. “Readers are fascinated to see that our lives run parallel to theirs,” says Kathleen Casey. “Featuring our people gives a greater reality to our magazine.”