women's magazines

This morning in the doctor’s office waiting room, I leafed through a copy of Ladies' Home Journal and landed on an article called,“The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Cleavage.” The article pairs tips for covering up your cleavage with a sidebar of celebrity’s “buzzworthy boobs.”

This is a real article. And it would be perfect fodder for the new women’s magazine parody website Reductress. Just launched last week, Reductress takes aim at media stuffed with “buzzworthy boob” profiles the way The Onion spoofs 24-hour newspapers. 

Among all the comedy online, Reductress stands out as genuinely fresh and funny.  Just look at these headlines:

Well, what do you know? I was just gearing up to write a post about the Bitch library’s recent acquisition of a full set of Sassy magazines—the first issue! the Kurt ’n’ Courtney issue! All the issues!—which were a gift from the fabulous Rita Hao, forever friend of Bitch and a member of our National Advisory Board. And then the news came down the Intertubes that tiny wunderkind style blogger Tavi Gevinson will be teaming up with founding Sassy editor Jane Pratt to launch a new teen magazine at some point in the not-too-distant future. According to a somewhat vague post on Gevinson’s blog, Style Rookie:

You guys may know how I feel about Sassy. You also may know that I've been babbling about how I think our generation should get one, too. Jane Pratt, founding editor and then EIC of Sassy, also became aware, and emailed me, and we've met a couple times, and it looks like we're going to start a magazine for an audience of wallflowerly teenage girls.

(I am trying so hard to be cool and professional right now.)

(Trying. so. hard.)

Of course, it won't be Sassy (or the rebirth of Sassy, or Sassy 2.0) and nor do we want it to be. For one, you can't try to recreate something that good. For another, while I can read old issues of Sassy and relate, the world has changed a bit in the past 15 or so years, and that whole Internet thing happened, and this world calls for something different. Something that will use Sassy as a point of reference for the whole teen-magazine-that-doesn't-suck thing, and something in which Jane Pratt will take part, but something that is not trying to recreate the other something a bunch of us love and don't want to see copied.

Cue the ladyfashion blogosphere going apeshit.