I started reading magazines as soon as I could read. My love of rock music as young as 6 or 7 years old had me adding the latest issue ofCircus or Creem orTiger Beat (guilty pleasure!) into my mom's grocery basket every week, especially if there was a cover featuring KISS, my favorite band as a child or, in my pre-teen years, Duran Duran. I later graduated to more serious rock music -- alternative rock and the classic rock that was before my time -- and added Rolling Stone, SPIN, NME, and a host of culture and fashion titles and before I knew it, as a young adult my magazine budget was competing with my budget for food! Oddly, I never subscribed to any of my favorite magazines. It would have been much cheaper. But for some reason the act of paging at the newsstand and picking and choosing which ones I wanted that week or month became a ritual that was the anticipatory preamble to actually sitting down and reading them. Paging at the newsstand and figuring out who many I could afford was so exciting. It was transporting. In the 90s, there was an energy to a newsstand section or store. No one was rushing in and out to grab the latest issue of US Weekly. People were there for nourishment. And we were a discerning bunch. (Fun Fact: I once stood near a blonde lady at a West Hollywood newsstand for 20 minutes as we both paged our favorite titles, silently weaving around one another to pick one title up and put another back before I realized I had been standing alone with Paris Hilton all that time and hadn't noticed it until her friend walked up and they started talking -- talk about meta!) A lame issue of Harper's that month allowed me to splurge on something else I wouldn't normally buy, like L'Uomo Vogue, which was gorgeously shot and worth the extra money, even if I couldn't read Italian. You could stare at the clothes, models, and sets forever. I left a good issue of my favorite magazines feeling part of something bigger, smarter and cooler than I was living in before.
I went to different magazines for different things. My intellectual side preferred The Atlantic, Harper's and The Nation to The New Yorker, for some reason. I've always been slightly embarrassed by the fact that I
thought some issues of The New Yorker were just downright boring. As badly as I wanted to be the person who could do it, I could not read 5,000 words on what's going on in Kosovo. But a dishy bit on Clinton's impeachment crisis or Obama's perceived aloofness to black voters was always welcome. When it was good it was good. And the cartoons and covers are created by superhumans, in my book. Geniuses. So while I liked The New Yorker, I liked it when I liked it but I didn't buy it automatically every month the way I would more often buy The Atlanticor Harper's because they spent more time talking about ideas than events or unpacking events and discussing the reasons they happened.
For my 'bro' news I bought Details (James Truman's and Daniel Peres's versions) and Men's Health. No matter who was on the cover or what the big stories were I knew I was going to love any issue of both because I loved the writing style, the voice, the content, and the sensitive, sophisticated male coolness of Details (as opposed to, say, Maxim) and healthy, intelligent, and informative masculinity of Men's Health (as opposed to, say, Men's Fitness or Muscle and Fitness). But like The New Yorker, GQ could be sometimesy. When my stepfather read it during my adolescence it was like Playboy without the nudes. It was the magazine for the elegant, sophisticated man whose macho was nuanced, highly-educated and affluent. But with a gigolo side, if you will. After Editor-In-Chief Art Cooper passed in the early aughts and was replaced by the much younger Jim Nelson, the latter took at least two generations off of the magazine, as a friend of mine put it at the time, and it read more like Details, speaking to people my age at the time. I liked Nelson'sGQ. But for some reason I missed the older man's GQ. It reminded me of my sophisticated stepfather and I liked knowing things like, what kind of bourbon to order at a fine steakhouse. I didn't want to see skinny jeans in GQ editorials. I wanted to see corduroys. I could find the right brand of skinny jeans through Details.
I was too young in the Tina Brown years to really get it but by the time Graydon Carter's Vanity Fair arrived it was an automatic buy. I didn't
even bother paging it at the stores. It was hands-down the most indispensable title of the 90s in my book. To have a quiet moment and read the latest issue of Vanity Fair... there are no words for how I miss those times. New York magazine was and is also excellent.
Like most of the people in my generation, I was obsessed with the 90s supermodels. And so Vogue, Elle, and Harper's Bazaar were a part of my monthly magazine diet. Luckily, my mother owned a hair salon with subscriptions to all so I could just scoop them up there after the next month's issues arrived. That was a treat. Many of my friends didn't get my love for these magazines (I'm not a fashionista by any means) but I didn't care and I wasn't ashamed. The writing was excellent. The book and film reviews, features, and culture stories were top-notch. And the editorials and ads, usually featuring the same group of models shot by the same group of photographers, made me feel like part of the in-crowd just knowing all of their names. When Anna Wintour stopped featuring supermodels on the covers and editorials -- featuring Hollywood actresses instead -- I stopped buying Vogue. And as the supermodels got older and faded away (and I did too) I lost interest in the whole fashion world. It got too big, lost its mystique, it's coolness, and I was growing out of the 18-34 y.o. market, which was forming a new Zeitgeist. Technology was starting to disrupt print. I stopped knowing who the people were on the covers of everything when I passed the newsstands. I stopped paging for hours and started spending more time online myself, on apps like Facebook. Suddenly, everyone was a supermodel to themselves and their own Instagram page became Vogue. My favorite magazines weren't speaking to me anymore. So I stopped speaking to them.
I'd love to fall in love with magazines again. I'd also love to go back to 1998. One of the reasons I've saved so many of my magazines over the years is for that very purpose: so they can take me back to 1998 or 1995 or 1992 anytime I want to go back there. Those were good times and, in magazines more than anywhere else, they were well documented for the ages.
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