America the Beautiful/Happy Birthday Allure

This month, my favorite fashion magazine is celebrating its 20th anniversary. To mark the occasion, the March Allure issue got appropriately retrospective, with features like a center-fold time-line of beauty milestones (including everything from the publishing of Wolf's The Beauty Myth in April 1991, to the release of the Nars blush called "Orgasm" in November 1994).

The issue also boasts a quasi-sociological survey on the topic of "what's beautiful now," with the premise of comparing evolving beauty standards and preoccupations from twenty years ago with today (incidentally, Angelina Jolie was voted top beauty idol, replacing Christie Brinkley). But what was of real interest to me was Linda Wells' "letter from the editor." Priding her book on its journalistic investigations and instructive tone, Wells has always negotiated that delicate balance that Rabine detailed in her essay on fashion magazines--that volatile alchemy that must at once respect readers as savvy post-mod aesthetes who seeks outlets of individuation, self-expression, and resistance, while on the other hand, attracting, lulling, and luring them as consumers. Wells tends to be fairly self-reflexive about the impetus of the fashion-beauty complex, but she still needs to uphold her publication as an intimate confidante or instructor. Below is a transcript of her letter:

A lot of people have a lot of theories about the American dream, and here’s mine: In this fine country you can become anything you want to if you have a modicum of talent, a little opportunity, and an absolute abundance of will; you can even become beautiful. By that, I am not suggesting extreme plastic surgery. I mean more manageable improvements and a healthy attractiveness: clear skin, straight, white teeth; groomed hair; contact lenses; a fit body.

Part of the pursuit of happiness is this pursuit of beauty. It is distinctly American, and it’s a quest that transcends gender, class, race, age, and sexual orientation. In this country, we assume that we have the right to determine and improve our essential selves, psychologically and physically. The way we look—along with our social and economic status—is flexible and mobile. The idea that effort can beget beauty is incredibly tantalizing. And what could be more optimistic.

My goal at Allure over the past 20 years has been to make beauty accessible to every woman, first by demystifying it, and then by explaining it in practical terms. When I started the magazine in 1991, beauty was underconsidered and overcomplicated. It was tangled up with vanity and with pleasing a man. I wanted to extricate it from those old ideas and let it flourish on its own terms as an expression of self-esteem and strength.

Today, though styles and attitudes about beauty have certainly changed, my mission is the same: to offer information, provide perspective, give pleasure, and help women shape and achieve their own personal dreams. And through our readers’ hopeful pursuit of beauty, I continue to strive to make Allure, in some small way, part of the American experiment.

Her letter in this issue intrigues me, because the language is earnest, populist, realistic, and thus seductive. Were I in her place, I'd probably want to write something similar, but in the spirit of deconstruction, it's interesting to see how unflinchingly she uses the rhetoric of self-determinism and free choice when it comes to beauty practices (no sense of coercive, normalizing power here), which Bordo would likely lambast. Also of note, is how she conflates this freedom of choice and the fundamental right to attain beauty as being tied to nationalism, also assuming that being American is synonymous with equality; similarly she sees the quest for beauty as transcending differences of race and class, when they may in fact emphasize and reinforce those very hierarchies and gulfs.

Ofcourse it would be easy for us to tear apart all of her assumptions and essentializing, but I think there is also merit in her ethos and writing. As the editor of a beauty magazine, she's fulfilling her role admirably--utopian-tinged portraits of unity with a healthy dose of Jeffersonian idealism is a lot more appealing to readers than skeptical analysis--but I also wonder if those in the industry see themselves as perpetuating the problems in the "empire of images," or if they truly cast themselves as messianic purveyors of products and resultant self-esteem.