bunnyshop shopping fashion blog

Tilda Swinton for AnOther

While we're way too puritanical to get completely behind her living situation (though really, in some ways it does seem like a family-friendly solution to a divorce \ mid-life crisis) we love Tilda Swinton, and that she so genuinely (almost) 50 and foxy. Nothing (except pie) makes us happier than when fashion houses team up with non-14-year-olds in an amazing way, and this definitely counts. Yay, London Fashion Week!

Hurrah: Love Debuts Tomorrow!

At least in the U.K. We went to the lengths of pretending to be a serious fashion journalist at Harvey Nichol's on Friday, after we heard that they were going to debut the issue there—and then at 3 p.m.—and then not at all, so we returned to New York empty handed (except for the other seven magazines in our bag.) Anyway: We salute the debut issue, with this image from it, of Agyness as the Queen.

The Love Cover!

Not sure we [ahem] love the logo font—isn't it a little, like, private-jet trade journal or something?—but we do love the Ditto, and we can't wait to try to track this down tomorrow at Doer Street Market.

Michelle Obama on Vogue Cover

We still have yet to buy a copy of Vogue in...er, this millennium (socialites! we! do! not! care!), but Michelle Obama, yay! We wish the surroundings were a little Ethan Allen, but we do love her in the purple.

NO!!!!! WORST NEWS EVER!

At least in the magazines we really liked category. Domino, RIP: We truly loved you!

Holy Cow! Maghound!

We love magazines. This admission comes as no surprise to anyone who knows us well. We actually managed to crack a brick wall in an old apartment - we had a shelf above our couch to keep our magazines out from under foot. From time to time, we'd throw out the old, add new.

Well, lo and behold, one day, we looked up - and there was a foot long crack, spidering out from the shelf. The weight of our magazines had cracked the brick, the drywall, and the plaster on our walls. We promptly took them down, spackled it up and moved. We did not move the magazines with us.

We rarely throw out back issues - who knows when you might need to reference something? And some magazines cost so much that you may as well throw a $10 bill down the drain (British Vogue,  we're looking at you here). We've tried to cut down on how many we get a month, subscriptions have lapsed, but we still get giddy when we get new ones.

A family member told us today about maghound.com; telling us, 'It's like Netflix for magazines'. We checked it out immediately, and then became confused. Do we have to return them at the end of the month? How can we possibly have all these magazines for $5 a month? It seems too good to be true. We called family member back, and as soon as she stopped laughing at us, she assured they magazines are yours to keep! Amazing! Or, we're just really dumb. Either way.

Here's the deal. For a set price a month, you get a set number of magazines a month. For $5, you get 3 titles, for $7 you get 5, and so on. You're not locked into a year subscription - so you can hop from title to title as you wish. And, you get to keep them. For your basic fashion titles, this doesn't make sense - you can get Marie Claire for $8 a year. But for more expensive titles, like Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, Dwell, etc - it ends up being a pretty decent deal.

We're starting with Popular Photography, Real Simple, Saveur, NY Magazine and Outside - we'll report back after we get our first issue(s). It's amazing!

If anyone else decides to give it a shot, let us know what you get! We love to know what others are reading!

-LB

Sundance Special: "The September Issue" Review

We thought, given the subject matter, that it would be reasonable to break into our normal coverage for our first-ever Sundance review on this site: "The September Issue," or, as we suggested to our Sundance roommate when we left the screening room, "The Devil Bares Nada." (Ba-dum-dum!) It is the story of the making of Vogue's titular September 2007 issue (the biggest-ever issue of a single-month consumer magazine, etc etc) and how Anna Wintour actually is mean in real life like she was in the Anne Hathaway movie.

Meaner: She does, in fact, actually tell one person (the innocent cameraman, drafted into service during a shoot) he's too fat and that he should go to the gym. Also, Sienna Miller's hair is "lackluster" and her toothy smile not up to Vogue standards. ("And I think these are fillings?") AW basically comes across as a repressed control freak whose overachieving family (including lawyer-to-be daughter Bee) thinks she's useless. The entire process would be heartbreaking if it weren't so often ridiculous, like when ALT shows up to play tennis with Louis Vuitton luggage in tow, or when stylist\model\editor Grace Coddington (easily the film's most likable presence) makes her salad the object of her displaced rage after some of her images are cut, murdering leafy greens with a heretofore-unseen lettuce-murdering vigor.

It's a great documentary, in sense that you're constantly like, How did they get that access? We have no idea why Wintour would be up for this, and the timing seems particularly bad, given the rumors that she'll soon be pushed out for Carine or sent to France on an ambassadorship. It's a little TMI, like when Wintour shows some total Roger Federer mentionitis. ("Did you see Roger won?") The access is amazing: Karl Lagerfeld, Mario Testino, Oscar de la Renta, Stefano Pilati, Vera Wang, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Thakoon all make appearances.

We didn't leave the screening understanding why AW went through all the hassle of being an editor, beyond her story about her father telling her to declare her interest in being the editor of Vogue when faced with filling out a questionnaire about her future. But for anyone who loves looking at pretty things, and is curious about the way the magazine comes together—and NB we work at a magazine, and we're still curious about it—we really wouldn't miss it.

The Two Best Magazine Deals Ever

Ever? We stand by our words. Because: free! Okay, so maybe not as good as the amazing, bizarre Urban Outfitters thing last year, where they were just giving everybody free subscriptions to Nylon, but:

Spend $75 at Shopbop and get a free subscription to Lucky. They are in the middle of a massive ultra-sale (the ubiquitous ultra-sales, we are thinking, along with >$2.00-per-gallon gas, are the recession's silver linings—or pewter linings, anyway), and we clicked on to their Bop Basics hoodie, thinking: That should be no more than $30. Original price? $88. (Thanks, but no thanks!) Current sale price? $26.40! Reasonable. It's all we ask for. Anyway: Bop Basics hoodie, $26.40

The other one: even more exciting, we think, because we love Domino so: Buy their new decorating book, and get a subscription free. We are totally in favor of free—especially when it arrives like a little bird at your house every few weeks. Domino: The Book of Decorating, $21.12

Our Favorite Magazine Cover in a Million Years: Elle by Gareth Pugh

So completely random and hard to look at and utterly unique. We are totally pro!

You know, we don't even dislike her but we're all, thank you God it's not another Keira Knightley cover.

Vogue India \ Italia and the Real People

We are, at the end of the day, true believers when it comes to magazines—we just can't help it. Half the best things we've ever found out we've found out thanks to magazines. (The Mongol Rally is one, if we—er, stretch the definition of "magazines" to actually include newspapers.) And we're even believers in the power of fashion magazines to create positive change. (Offsetting the normal negative-change setting.) By "fashion magazines," in the preceding sentence, we chiefly mean Vogue Italia, which, in our opinion, does the best job of both selling itself and making a variety of points. We still love the Meisel-shot State of Emergency story, which is two years old at this point. This summer's Black Issue is another example:

That's Iman. Please God please let us have inherited some vaguely similar genetic makeup re: aging \ not-aging.

However: Vogue India. When we first saw a headline about how they'd put members of various (read: lower) class citizens in, say, Burberry overcoats and Fendi bibs, we thought: That is good, as it is usually good when the subjects of fashion editorial include people who are not models—"real people," such as we are. We guess we are quite expectant re: any available subtext in these "real people" stories, and we generally demand that they speak to the fashion world's inherently non-democratic impulses, and how acknowledging this is the first in a very long series of steps to improved economic conditions for all. But as the Times quotes Vogue India's editor:

 

“Lighten up,” she said in a telephone interview. Vogue is about realizing the “power of fashion” she said, and the shoot was saying that “fashion is no longer a rich man’s privilege. Anyone can carry it off and make it look beautiful,” she said.

 

... Not taking a close enough look at the “real people” is drawing criticism for Vogue, too. “The magazine does not even bother to identify the subjects” of the photos, said Ms. Kanika Gahlaut, the columnist. Instead, Vogue names the brands of the accessories in the captions, and says they are worn by a lady or a man.

The captioning is really what did us in. Fashion is a rich [wo]man's privilege. Style isn't. A Fendi bib: $100. Burberry umbrella: $200. Omnipresent fashion-world snobbery: priceless. We're thinking Vogue Italia isn't under siege re: its title as the Vogue title most likely to have a prescient thought.