Shelf life for lads' mags...

‘Lads, gags and shags’ mags might be falling in sales but, SUSAN DALY asks, have readers’ tastes really changed – or are they just gone elsewhere?

WHAT men want is what marketers the world over want to know. Nearly 300 years ago, the first men’s magazine appeared to have it all figured out.

The Gentleman’s Magazine was launched in 1731 to great success. It titillated subscribers with a heady mix of social gossip and gruesome details of recent executions. It printed tips from readers on how to keep all one’s own teeth and hair into advanced age (which, granted, was probably no more than 55 in the 18th century).

Gawping at celebs, body-consciousness and a fascination with gore – it doesn’t sound a million miles removed from the lad-mag culture of today.
Nonetheless an American media mogul is claiming that the lads’ mag as we know it is dead. Michael Rideout (what fun mags like Nuts or Zoo would have with that name) is launching a new publication and website targeting men in the 25-34 age bracket. He has given the brand the aspirational name of MadePossible and describes it as the “anti-Maxim”, referring to one of the former market leaders in the ‘girls, gadgets and grog’ magazine sector.

“At around 25, guys start making grown-up choices for the first time that will largely shape their future,” he says. Young men want substance, not sex in their bathroom reading material, he argues.

If Rideout is right, then the end must be nigh for a huge publishing phenomenon: the lads’ mag. Top-shelf men’s material has been around since the advent of lurid Victorian ‘penny dreadfuls’ – cheap pulp fiction aimed at young men – right through the creation of Playboy and its more hardcore successors Penthouse and Hustler. But what the 1990s brought was a boom in men’s magazines that were considered acceptable to display at eye-level, just about.

In 1994, Loaded fired the first volley in a revolution of mainstream men’s mags. Esquire and GQ existed at the time as glossy men’s ‘lifestyle’ publications but were concerned with literary essays and advising readers on the importance of wearing an expensive watch.

By contrast, Loaded announced that it would be the magazine “for men who should know better”. Its 20-something creator James Brown said they spoke to “the millions of real blokes who love football and want to pull women… I’m very proud to say we’ve lowered the tone.”

Quick to lower it further – and noticing the 250,000 copies sold by Loaded in a matter of 18 months – titles like FHM and Maxim appeared on the scene. FHM in particular captured the …er… imagination of hormonal young readers with its High-Street Honeys competition, which celebrated “real-life hotties” by inviting them to pose for the mag in bikinis. Female C-list celebs began to see the obligatory photoshoot for a lads’ mag as a viable career move (see panel).

James Brown has claimed that he wasn’t trying to do anything that hadn’t already been deemed a success in women’s magazines. To persuade his publishers that Loaded wouldn’t be taken off the shelves for being too lewd, he showed them headlines and articles about sex taken from women’s magazines. “At the centre I placed an article giving details on ‘How To Give A Blow Job’ from Cosmo,” he said.

The men’s magazine sector had never seen anything like the bump in circulation figures in the following five years. FHM, which took over as market leader, sold almost a million copies a month between the UK and Ireland by 1998. It fit with the laddish culture of Men Behaving Badly on TV and Oasis in the charts, supposedly obsessed with beer, birds and tongue-in-cheek humour. If you didn’t see the fig leaf of irony – as some commentators and sociologists didn’t – the implication was that you weren’t getting it.

Here, where Playboy was only available in a brown envelope from cousin Mikey in America until 1993, the new additions to the newsagents looked startling next to copies of Ireland’s Own and the RTE Guide.

The sales figures stayed high until the early Noughties – or Naughties, as the mags would probably have called them – but were massively hit by the downward evolution of even less sexually subtle weekly titles like Zoo and Nuts.

With their competitions to “win your girlfriend a boob job”, gross-out pics of freak accidents and what the industry would call a high nipple count, there is no pretence that they are being read for their articles. There have been calls to have the mags bagged, tagged and reassigned to the top shelf. A recent ‘publishing error’ in Zoo magazine caused huge controversy when actor Danny Dyer’s celebrity column advised a broken-hearted reader to cut his ex-girlfriend’s face.

They are under siege on the sales front too have seen a drastic fall in circulation. Zoo and Nuts were down over 20 per cent off their year-on-year sales in the last half of 2009.

Does this mean that the boys have finally grown up? It would be a pretty abrupt end to the history of soft porn and erotica. Cave art from over 12,000 years ago found in Creswell Crag, England only a few years ago includes huge paintings of female genitalia. When Victorian archaeologists cracked open the ruins of Pompeii, they were so mortified by the many artefacts inscribed with graphic depictions of sex acts that felt the need to hide them away in a secret museum in Naples for over 150 years.

A cursory glance at the reading habits of the Irish male might conclude that they are a refined bunch compared to the inhabitants of ancient Rome. Homegrown magazines dedicated to the Irish male have never managed to take off here, for example.

But on closer look, the titles that tried their hand and ultimately failed, Patrick and Himself, were pretty tame. The first media brand to target the Irish male in quite some time is the new website Joe.ie. It appears again to be a relatively restrained mix of sports, style, entertainment news, motors and money. (Although it does feature a section titled ‘Joe’s Lovely Ladies’, currently illustrated by a pic of everyone’s favourite FAS model Georgia Salpa.)

It is interesting to note, however, that the section of Joe.ie with most hits in the first few months of the site’s existence is not the GAA column by Cork icon Sean Og O hAilpin nor the healthy eating column by chef Kevin Dundon. It is the sex and relationship agony aunt column by glamour model Claire Tully. Topics to tickle Tully’s fancy include bikinis (to wear or not to wear), cross-dressing and the rather less inconsequential matter of false rape allegations.

Sexual obsession might be moved out of the eyeline of the impressionable from time to time like those kinky Pompeiian artefacts but in those cases it just goes underground for a while. More likely, lad-culture magazine buyers have simply gone online. When Australian lads’ mag Ralph announced the current issue will be its last ever, due to poor sales, its publisher Phil Scott said it was because the tastes of young male readers had changed. “The growth of online is a factor but if history is any guide, it is not the key issue,” he claimed.

Yet most lads’ mags seem to recognise the siren call of the online portal into ever more raunchy content – they have all launched their own websites with ‘extra value’ material. (The Nuts website is currently home to 100 Real Girls in Bed, videos of crazy car stunts and a competition called Assess My Breasts).

On top of that, those with more extreme tastes know they can easily find other sites where the kind of material available is not subject to consumer watchdogs. It makes the breasts and booze of lads’ mags look almost quaint.

SOFT PORN – OR CAREER MOVE? Five lads’ mags favourite cover girls (Or in ladspeak: Top five birds)
GAIL PORTER: The children’s TV presenter said she had no idea FHM were going to project a naked image of her photoshoot with them on the London Houses of Parliament – but it gave the mag record-breaking sales in July 1999, and made Porter a household name.
ABI TITMUSS: The former nurse emerged from the shadow of being ex-girlfriend of disgraced telly personality John Leslie by posing for 38 covers of lads’ magazines in 2004 and 2005, and becoming a reality TV regular off the back of it. She has since become an actress but did a photoshoot for Nuts last year.
JENNIFER ELLISON: The baby-faced Brookside actress put what in lads’ mag parlance would be her blonde, busty looks to work as a regular pin-up. Her first such shoot was for FHM at the age of 16 under the headline ‘Jailbait’. She has since said that posing for lads’ mags has hurt her acting career in the UK, saying “UK casting agencies can be a bit sniffy” about glamour models.
CHANELLE HAYES: The female contestants on this year’s final series of Channel 4’s Big Brother who stripped off within hours of entering the house will no doubt be contemplating a lucrative, if possible short, stint doing the same for lads’ mags on their eviction.
It has been a tradition of BB that each cast has at least one camera-loving exhibitionist – and a tradition of the mags to feature them on the cover immediately after. Chanelle Hayes claim to fame in 2007’s Big Brother was a striking resemblance to Victoria Beckham. Since then, she has become one of the most regular BB contestants to pose for lads’ mags and co-presented Nuts TV in 2008.
ENDS

Size matters

The market is demanding plus-size fashion be taken seriously - but what does high fashion think?
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/young--fat-and-fabulous-2066267.html



By Susan Daly

Wednesday February 17 2010

Real women eat their dinner. Real women are an average dress size 14. And real women are 'infiltrating' high fashion, gracing catwalks that were previously only stalked by impossibly thin models.

Or are they? It's hard to tell over the trumpeting noises that have accompanied new forays by high-end mags and designers into the world of the larger model. Germany's best-selling magazine, Brigitte, has just published its first issue that is totally devoid of 'traditional' models. Brigitte -- with an average readership age of 48 -- is not at the cutting-edge of fashion. However, when its editor-in-chief Andreas Lebert announced his plans with a press release that proclaimed Brigitte's stand against an industry that he says "is anorexic", it was reported in the international press.

British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman fired off a letter to designers last June criticising them for supplying "minuscule" sample garments for photoshoots, forcing Vogue to hire models "with jutting bones and no breasts or hips" to fit into them.

There was also excitement when US Glamour magazine published an unairbrushed photograph of plus-size model Lizzie Miller (she's an Irish size 12-14).

The praise for Glamour's decision to display Miller's small roll of belly flab was disproportionate to the prominence of the picture in the magazine. The pic measured three inches by three inches and was buried back on page 194 of the issue.

Still, the rapturous response does indicate a public appetite for fleshier models.

A scene in the movie The Devil Wears Prada explains how decisions on a hem length or fabric colour made by the powers-that-be in high fashion trickles down to the high street.

Is it possible that the trickle-down effect has reversed? Take the case of designer Karl Lagerfeld, currently being praised for shooting plus-size burlesque star Miss Dirty Martini for high-fashion US glossy V, who scorned the decision by Brigitte to make itself a model-free zone.

The magazine, he claimed, was being unduly influenced by "fat mummies sitting with their bags of crisps in front of the television, saying that thin models are ugly".

Either Lagerfeld's had an epiphany or he's realised he's out of step with the public. The more democratic world of the internet is producing a growing number of self-styled "fatshionistas". These plus-size, style-obsessed bloggers are publishing blogs like Musings of a Fatshionista and Fat Girls Like Nice Clothes Too.

Twentysomething teacher Gabi Gregg has appeared on US television speaking about her Young, Fat and Fabulous blog.

The content is similar to other personal style sites -- she posts photographs of herself in her favourite outfits.

She also alerts her readers to plus-size clothing lines and other plus-size bloggers. Her mission statement is only quasi-political: "I'm a fun-loving girl who happens to have a flair for fashion. I'm just trying to change the world one fat girl at a time."

The market has started to wake up to this sea change in demand. ASOS.com has launched a 'Curves' section. In Ireland, simplybe.ie has run a Curvy Competition for the past three years to discover new plus-size modelling talent. The king of positive body image acceptance, Gok Wan, crowned last year's winner.

Simplybe.ie's commercial manager Brenda O'Sullivan says there is a demand for "fashionable clothes that weren't just exaggerated sizes but were tailored for the curvier lady". As for whether she believes high fashion has truly embraced the larger woman, O'Sullivan is adamant: "Absolutely not -- yet size 16 is the best-selling size in the market place."

It's a feeling echoed by Jules Fallon, co-owner of Irish model agency 1st Option, which supplies models for high-end designers. The demand for plus-size models has been growing so much that Jules has stepped in front of the camera herself in recent times.

"We are finding the demand is coming from all angles," says Fallon. "I think it's definitely changing."

Nonetheless, Fallon has just had a troubling experience sending some of her girls to model in the London Fashion Week.

"One of the girls had a 35.5-inch hip measurement and the agency refused to put her through, saying the absolute limit was a 35-inch hip," says Fallon. "In Spain, they check the Body Mass Index of the models in Madrid Fashion Week to make sure they are a healthy weight. London is just crazy."

The fashion industry appears to be singing from different hymn books from country to country.

A judge on Australia's Next Top Model says there is no market for plus-size models in Oz.

"We could have a plus-size model win the competition and she would end up doing catalogues for Target (department store)," says Charlotte Dawson.

Kristi Kuudisim, one of Ireland's most in-demand plus-size models, says she never even considered modelling as a career option until she moved here seven years ago.

"In Estonia, they just want skinny models." She claims there still are not very many plus-size models working consistently in Ireland but that she is getting busier by the year.

"I notice even the fashion magazines in the last six months have had bigger models in them. Six years ago, you wouldn't find one," says Kuudisim.

"I don't think it's a novelty -- but there are certain clothes that look better on skinny women. But there should be a market for both because there are some clothes that look better filled out."

Kuudisim rejects the notion that the use of plus-size models is normalising obesity. "A plus-size model is still a model," she insists. "You have to be toned. I don't sit on a couch doing nothing. I don't starve myself but I eat healthily and work out."

So the demand is there -- is it just a case if when, not if, the high-fashion industry gives in wholeheartedly to it?

Kuudisim says the nature of the work she is attracting is changing. "I'm being called to do a lot of editorial work (high-end magazine photoshoots)," she says. "That didn't happen before."

Jules Fallon thinks that magazines like Vogue, Glamour and V are "testing the water". There has been debate over the real value of highly publicised shoots carried by US Glamour and V when the plus-size models used are frequently depicted nude or semi-nude. Is this promoting the larger woman in the context of fashion, or simply fetishising their bodies?

Then there is the argument that what fashion considers plus-size ("anything from a size 10 or 12", says Kuudisim) is not so in the real world. 'Plus-size' model Lara Stone is a size eight, but because her body shape is not androgynous -- she has hips and breasts -- she is lauded as a poster girl for the fuller-figured woman.

"The likes of Vogue are not going to change overnight," says Jules Fallon.

"But I do think the day of heroin chic look is binned and gone. LA celebrities are a good watermark of where the industry is at. The 'lollipop ladies', heads bigger than their bodies, are disappearing. They are starting to change their attitudes that being skinny is not going to necessarily get you a job."

Whether the runway can be as fashion-forward is still up for debate.

WISE UP AND SIZE UP
The fashion and beauty industries' small steps towards accepting plus-size women ...

2004: As part of their 'Campaign for Real Beauty', Dove cosmetics' global survey finds that women "believe in a broader definition of beauty than the narrowly defined ideals most often portrayed in popular culture".

2006: Former celebrity stylist Gok Wan teaches 'real' women to be self-confident about their shape in his hit Channel 4 programme, How To Look Good Naked.

2007: US Glamour announces its 'First Annual Figure Flattery' issue in October and makes America Ferrera, star of Ugly Betty, its cover girl. Website Jezebel noted how trim Ferrera appeared as a cover girl in contrast to a shot of her taken at the Emmy Awards on the week the issue launched. Glamour insisted the cover picture had not been digitally slimmed.

2008: Whitney Thompson becomes the first plus-size contestant to win America's Next Top Model.

2009: German magazine Brigitte announces in November that it is to make its pages a "model-free zone", inviting "real people" to model for fashion pages.

2010: Designer Karl Lagerfeld shoots plus-size burlesque star Miss Dirty Martini for the February 'Size' edition of high-fashion US magazine V.

The 2010 advertising campaign for plus-size high-street store Evans arranges a bevy of plus-size models in an homage shoot to the famous 1990 cover for Vogue which featured supermodels Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford and Tatjana Patitz.

That was the Noughties...

The Review of the Decade magazine I edited is FREE with today's Irish Independent - plenty to read when you're hibernating at home tomorrow. Having switched so much to writing these past two years, it was great to get my teeth back into a meaty piece of editing for a month or so.

Listen to me plug it here on the Tom Dunne Show on Newstalk... http://vimeo.com/8471386

Cover girls

I love it when a sub inserts an exclamation mark to spice up a paragraph - not. Anyway, here is my airbrushed piece from today's Irish Independent.

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/fashion-beauty/now-theyre-airbrushing-the-cover-girls-bigger-1775680.html

NOW THEY'RE AIRBRUSHING THE COVER GIRLS BIGGER
Magazines have been notorious for retouching the cover shots of their models so they look thinner. Now a backlash has editors trying to do just the opposite. Susan Daly reports

Wednesday June 17 2009
The worst-kept secret in the beauty and fashion business is that an airbrush is a model or celebrity's best friend. Traditionally, this piece of technological wizardry has been used to slim down limbs and banish blemishes on digital photographs so that they are seen fit to grace the cover of a magazine.
The argument against this retouching of reality has been that it is harmful to impressionable readers, leading to eating disorders, body dysmorphia and issues of low self-esteem as they try to attain the impossible perfection presented in these photographs.
Well, the reality just got grimmer -- and slimmer. Alexandra Shulman, the influential editor of UK Vogue magazine, has written a letter to all the major fashion designers to warn them that she is now having to ask her photographers to make her cover models look bigger!
The sample sizes which many designers provide for photoshoots are so tiny, she says, that she has to hire ever-increasingly skeletal models to fit into them.
These models are so thin that she fears alienating her readers altogether. Her photographers must now use all their trickery not to take these girls down a size -- as was more traditional in the wafer-thin fashion world -- but to beef them up.
Robin Derrick, creative director of Vogue, backed up Shulman's claims. "I spent the first 10 years of my career making girls look thinner," he said, "I've spent the last 10 making them look larger." The size zero debate has gone sub-zero.
It's ironic, really, that a fashion magazine editor is complaining about having to skew reality to make her models acceptable to readers. For years, the same editors would have argued that no-one wants to buy a dress from an overweight model (for overweight, read a size 10 and up).
Flawless, thin, impossibly beautiful and generally white -- that was the type to which cover girls conformed.
Side by side with Shulman's move back to healthy-slim, we are told there is a backlash against the doctoring of magazine cover images altogether. Airbrushing and digital manipulation is out: undoctored beauty is in.
French Elle recently flirted with reality by featuring three celebrities without make-up on their cover of their April edition. The inclusion of bare-faced ladies in a high-fashion mag was internationally applauded, although the "au naturel" celebrities featured -- actresses Monica Bellucci and Sophie Marceau and supermodel Eva Herzigova -- are genetically blessed with fabulous bone structures to begin with.
Anna Wintour, the formidable editor-in-chief of US Vogue, has also been embracing diversity in her previously rigid cover girl criteria. When the Ethiopian model Liya Kebede posed for the May edition, she followed Beyoncé and Michelle Obama to become the third black woman in a row to appear on the cover.
"About a year ago, we talked about the global conversation about diversity in fashion, and we took it very seriously," said Patrick O'Connell, a spokesman for US Vogue.
US Vogue, lest we forget, was also the magazine that published a cover shot of an almost unrecognisable Oprah Winfrey in 1998. Winfrey spent months shrinking herself to Anna Wintour's acceptable parameters for the style bible.
"If you want to be on the cover of Vogue and Anna Wintour says you have to be down to 150lbs -- that's what you gotta do," said Winfrey, which is a worrying statement from the apparent queen of self-empowerment and self-respect.
That Wintour is doing a U-turn can only be good, right? Yet some see such talk of diversification as merely trend-driven, a stunt to keep readers attracted to an industry that sells fantasy in the form of luxury items.
When Italian Vogue published its "Black Issue" in June of last year, featuring only black models, it sold out within 72 hours -- but was criticised in some quarters for tokenism.
Cover fakery is still widespread. Actress Kate Winslet protested against GQ lengthening and slimming her legs to stick-insect proportions in 2003. Fast-forward to late last year and she denies that Vanity Fair airbrushed her semi-naked body for an Oscars issue, although she admitted to six hours of make-up, hair and light set-ups for the shoot.
Dove cosmetics launched a viral video on the internet last year called Evolution that caused quite a stir. It showed one average-looking woman being transformed through make-up, re-styling, lighting and digital retouching to produce a model-worthy photograph. "No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted," read the kicker line on the video.
The Swedish Ministry of Health has launched a similar campaign to show the country's teenagers how model shots can be manipulated.
A separate website controversially published two photographs of country singer Faith Hill last year -- one in which she looks like the naturally attractive 40-something mother that she is; and the other in which she has been freakily Photoshopped to look like a woman in her early 30s for the cover of Redbook magazine.
This is the same magazine that did a Frankenstein job on Julia Roberts for a cover story in 2003, using a picture of her head from a 2002 paparazzi shot on top of a photo of her body from the 1998 Notting Hill premiere.
The photograph was accompanied with a headline that read, with no trace of irony, "The Real Julia".
The tricks of the trade are no secret. Digital photo manipulation can trim fat, even out skin tone, banish blemishes, add shine to hair, even change the colour of an outfit.
New York magazine was accused of "whitewashing" Michelle Obama on their March cover by giving her a Barbie pink lipstick and lightening her skin tone, although they defended it as an "illustration" rather than a photograph.
A good sign that an image has been airbrushed is when the skin is so flawless that it seems plastic and unreal. The sardonic celeb-style website gofugyourself.com regularly takes a poke at hyper-real cover photos -- its archive has a worryingly long list of entries. The model and actress Jenny McCarthy highlighted her own dodgy covershot for last month's US Shape magazine.
The shot, she admitted, had undergone "a crap load of airbrushing ... I have freckles ... and stretchmarks that you do not see here, and they add a little shadowing to make these muscle things happen that don't exist on my body."
Even with the digital paintbrush out of the picture, there are ways to fake a flawless portrait. People magazine made a big fuss of its 100 Most Beautiful list in 2007, which included 10 celebrities looking dewy-faced without -- gasp -- their make-up, or airbrushing. But clever photographers' tricks were used to flatter the women (including Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel and Rachel Bilson who are in their 20s and wrinkle-free anyway).
Several of the pictures were taken with a long exposure, disguising small imperfections. The shots were also overexposed to the point that the brown-skinned Rosario Dawson looked positively white -- all to fade out uneven skin tone, spots and freckles.
Most of the women were shot wearing white clothing, against a white background, to act as a further natural reflector to fill in dark shadows and blemishes. The women also stood in front of wind machines to tease some energy into their tresses.
But should we worry so much about smoothed-out stars giving false example when fantasy has always been the nub of showbiz? Think of those soft-focus, up-lit portraits of the earliest Hollywood stars.
Black and white is so flattering, darling. Some historians believe that even the iconic bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti -- the world's first beauty queen -- may have been touched up.
The artist who created it is thought to have straightened her nose and smoothed creases around her mouth to present her in the most flattering light. With the idealisation of beauty so culturally-entrenched, it may take more than a few celebs sans slap to change it.