your friendly film person :)

Can we talk about how disappointing women’s magazines are?

Not small, niche magazines with clear themes and intention. Large, globally established magazines that are a little bit of everything supposedly. In Greece especially they perceive women as one-dimensional: “women like pretty things and makeup”.

No. Fuck you.

When I was a kid I had this idea in my head, this fantasy that grown-up women’s magazines are incredibly sophisticated and complex. That the shoes and clothes they talked about weren’t simple advertised items, they were art pieces with a story and a purpose. Boy was I disappointed by what I saw when I bought my first copy of Vogue with my own money. If I read one more vapid article about what the new fashion obsession of the year will be, I will go crazy. Consuming too much of anything will either eventually make you sick or allergic, why is that not the case for these magazine companies? Realistically, who is still reading them? I’m not saying cut the trendy things entirely, we like keeping up with trends, just add a little variety in between.

Vogue Greece is like one giant 40-minute advertisement of all the brands that fund them. After you flip through the first 20 pages of in-your-face ads (and one very sweet note from the Editor In Chief) and you get to the first article, you feel like you’re getting set up for something really luxurious. Once I noticed, however, that every single article was in big part a marketing pitch for a product I saw a couple pages ago, I got pissed off. I am no journalist so I am no authority on how that job is done, but as an audience member I will freely voice my thoughts.

Let’s look at the actual description of Vogue as it appears on their website, vogue.com:

“Over the years, Vogue has evolved with the times, coming to encompass a wider world of culture, entertainment, beauty, politics and the arts, dedicating itself to a celebration of groundbreaking image-making, great journalism, and the discovery of new talent.”

Our greek Vogue is basically a small booklet of luxuries we can’t afford. It is yet another example of a big brand coming to Greece, the country being unable to shoulder the cost of integrating it correctly, and taking “the most essential bits” to have a sort-of comparative magazine to the original. I’m still curious who they decided the target audience was for Vogue in Greece, honestly I really can’t tell. It’s not fashion lovers, not classy elites, maybe lovers of good photography?

Before I came to this conclusion I let myself sit on this thought for a long time while simultaneously doing just a touch of research. Maybe since print is a dying medium they have their catchy “good stuff” online, I thought. I spent quite a few weeks reading articles, refreshing, scouring vogue.gr for all things it had to offer. Most notably they have a reoccuring opinions/culture/politics segment written by Xenia Kounalaki called “The X Files”. I’m assuming they’ve given her a tight word limit for the online stuff cause a lot of it leaves me wanting more. It is a lot of the same basic fashion blog stuff otherwise, “bags of the season” this and “anti-aging” that. There is also quite a bit of content on company events and who-wore-what.

After my finds proved mostly disappointing, I decided to start looking up the contributors. Maybe I should consider that I’m biased because I envisioned it differently, I thought, after all, these people are professional journalists. Yes they are – in fact all of them previously worked at the greek newspaper Kathimerini, which owns the rights to Vogue Greece.

See where I’m going with this?

They are fabulous journalists… but most of them are news journalists except for the top heads and directors. No wonder the issue I read feels heartless – it is. The people working on selling you the fantasy have done nothing but report on serious sociopolitical events prior to this gig. It’s unsurprising that the newspaper would indoctrinate their own people into a new venture instead of looking to hire new collaborators, that is how the world works… but it is a pity for the end result to be this flat when the name it carries is that of a global fashion & lifestyle beast. They seem to try to make up for this by creating “new talent initiatives”, asking up-and-coming local artists who do actually deeply immerse themselves in the field, to volunteer their work and be featured.

I hate to repeat myself but: No. Fuck you.

Hire the new talents and pay them like you should instead of this repeated act of “charity”. Then maybe, your magazine will flourish and rise to the standards of Vogues worldwide.

I am aware that creating a magazine issue takes weeks of planning, organizing and painstaking work. Revisions, editing, photoshoots, interviews, runway coverage, lifestyle events, more revisions, more editing. It is not my intention to discredit the work that’s been done. I have no doubt in my mind that all contributors of Vogue Greece are stretched thin to produce a result that everyone is proud of, in my eyes they’ve simply missed the mark. Magazines are definitely “fluff” reads but they still should have a little something to keep you engaged to not just flip page after page mindlessly. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood their goal as a publication and the point is in fact just advertising for the large beauty and fashion conglomerates.

That’s just not how I see Vogue personally. Vogue is not a brand, it’s an idea. It’s a high compliment, it’s chic, it’s its own unique entity. Little girls dream of Vogue even if they’re not connected to fashion because it’s more, it’s a lifestyle. It is a disservice to the Vogue fandom to have an issue so dead-set on aggressively selling you items that cost more than a month’s salary for most people reading. What made people like me eager to read was the feeling that somehow through buying Vogue they took a small part in the luxury, in the art of it all. How do we connect with art? We see even the smallest piece of ourselves in it.

Please, give women a chance to fall in love with magazines again by making them about more than meets the eye.