This series is based on the blog/book Stuff White People Like.
10. Fashion Magazines
Female People like fashion magazines. Often, Male People aren't sure why their homes end up littered with pages torn from these glossy publications.
What is it about the fashion magazine that attracts the female person?
1. Pretty, shiny things
Fashion magazines to Female People are like car magazines to Male People - aspirational. They are packed full of articles, editorials and adverts which show stunning clothes, jewellery, shoes handbags - things the Female Person covets but cannot always have. Just looking at them, imagining being thin and rich enough to own them, is fun.
2. Fashion guidance
The fashion world is as unpredictable as the stock market. Wedge shoes which are triple A rated this season are a poisonous asset the next. Choosing what's hot and what's not is hard enough for the experts, let alone man on the street.
The Female Person needs help navigating these turbulent waters and finds the map she needs in the fashion magazine. Twenty minutes spent thumbing through the pages will explain she should buy those pumps in blue, not purple, that she can dust off her old red mary janes and that her wedges need to be put in their box and buried in the back of the closet until the inevitable circle of fashion life is complete and they come into vogue again.
3. A quick and easy escape, available when you need it
A magazine is not a book.
A fashion magazine is the sum of various parts which can be digested in bite-size chunks. Even reading the whole thing cover to cover doesn't take that long. Reading a magazine doesn't take commitment or carve a hunk out of a busy day. Reading a fashion magazine is like buying take out instead of cooking - quick and easy.
A fashion magazine is a convenient mini-escape that you can come back to again and again (especially if you leave it next to the toilet) without having to remember where you were.
A fashion magazine is always fresh. It has the same look, the same names for sections, the same approach, but there's a new issue on a weekly or monthly basis! Like fashion itself, it's never static or boring.
4. A wonderful world
Fashion magazines are carefully crafted to be things of beauty. Famous photographers apply their art in both the fashion shoots and the ads that intersperse them. Every person pictured in the fashion magazine is thin, has a geometrically proportioned face and has great hair. Between the covers of the magazine, it really is an amazing universe.
Fashion magazines are carefully crafted to be things of beauty. Famous photographers apply their art in both the fashion shoots and the ads that intersperse them. Every person pictured in the fashion magazine is thin, has a geometrically proportioned face and has great hair. Between the covers of the magazine, it really is an amazing universe.
And so never mind how many of the fashion magazine's polished pages end up in recycling, for they've given a Female Person somewhere a little mental moment in a parallel world where everything is ordered perfection, before she looks up from the loo and realizes there's dust on the rim of the bath and she has to do another bloody microclean...