Category: Media

Great sources for fashion styling

Cold Cream 'n' Roses

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I’ve hesitated to editorialize about fashion because fashion is personal. Moreover, I’m on the other side of 40 and don’t shop the trends.

Styling is key. If you want to shop the trends and wear them right, there are a few resouces that I recommend, some obvious and others that might surprise you (they surprised me).


Lucky is the best source for styling and deconstructing whole outfits.


While InStyle focuses on celebrity fashion, its Great at Any Age feature provides advice on how to wear a look in your 20s, 30s, and 40s. The looks created for women who are older than your age group won’t look frumpy.

I’ve noted that the Wall Street Journal has expanded its lifestyle coverage to the point of launching a weekend edition and even a Wall Street Journal Weekend TV show on the Fine Living TV network. WSJ articles summarize the trends and how to wear them, analyze the market, and feature the expert views of people in the fashion industry about the durability of trends.

Another surprising source for styling is the fall Newport News catalogue. I had long thought that the Newport News catalogue was tawdry, but I am impressed how it’s been redesigned as a “magalog” (magazine+catalog) featuring fashion trend reports, styling tips, and different color stories.

You’ll find sites that link to Lucky, InStyle, The Wall Street Journal, and Newport News through a search of The Style Page. We have also added new content to our Fashion pages – don’t forget to update your bookmarks!

WHAT’S NEW: Media

Cold Cream 'n' Roses

The Media page on The Style Page has undergone major changes.

The media page links to three major publishers of lifestyle magazines in the U.S:

Conde Nast – publishers of Allure, Architectural Digest, Cargo, Lucky, Vogue, and Domino, the shopping magazine for the home, which will debut in April 2005. Conde Nast is already seeking charter subscribers on the basis of a sneak peak into a few of the pages of Domino.

Time Inc. – publishers of InStyle, People, REAL SIMPLE, Southern Living, Sunset, and of course, Time.

Hearst Corporation – publishers of Cosmo, Marie Claire, O (Oprah), and SHOP Etc. While I was critical of SHOP Etc., it’s growing on me, even though their style is still too frou-frou for me. I bought the first three issues at the newsstand, and then decided that it was time to subscribe.

The media page features links to Fashion and lifestyle coverage from major newspapers, such as the International Herald Tribune, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Telegraph (UK). Please note that access to online coverage for these publications might require registration or even a paid subscription.

Finally, the media page features links to “new” publishing ventures, such as femail.co.uk (featuring Trinny and Elizabeth of BBC’s What Not to Wear), handbag.co.uk, and MochaSofa from Canada.

For those of you who track this blog via news aggregators such as Bloglines, you can track updates to The Style Page web site by subscribing to http://www.thestylepage.com/thestylepage.xml

I hope that you like the updates to the Media page. You can subscribe to many of the magazines listed here through amazon.com.

What Guys Want

Cold Cream 'n' Roses

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I picked up a copy of the premiere issue of CARGO, the men’s version of Lucky magazine.


CARGO

I’ve been a fan of Lucky from the beginning. The main purpose of women’s magazines is to deliver their audiences to the advertisers. Magazines such as Vogue often have a disconnect between articles on social and political issues on one hand and opulent fashion spreads on the other. (Yes, I know that I’m writing this after sending two messages to The Style Page e-group about the terrorist attacks in Madrid – a member from Malaysia unsuscribed that day. Coincidence?) Lucky, I think, is much more honest in that it dispenses with everything except delivering the audience to its advertisers.

But anyway, back to Cargo. Whereas Lucky focuses on fashion, beauty, and lifestyle, Cargo focuses on “Tech” (consumer electronics), Style, Cars, and Culture. “Culture” here is a catchall that encompasses interior decoration and food & drink, as “culture” on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is a catchall that includes etiquette and nice manners. Another difference is that Cargo is much more wordy than Lucky – are guys really more concerned with how things perform, while women are more concerned with how things look, or is that just a myth?

I was rather turned off by the blatant approach to sex in Cargo. There is a short feature on the Trovata clothing design team, whose T-shirts and cargo pants feature “nudie” graphics, another feature on buying roses that says that peach-colored roses mean “Sheer lust, Baby,” and lastly, a feature on what to wear on a third date, as many women say that they’d go to bed with a man by the third date.

I can’t resist bringing up Queer Eye again. The thing that I like about Queer Eye, and what I suspect that many other women like, is that it’s about pleasing the woman in one’s life and romance. Cargo, on the other hand, is more about getting laid.

BTW Cargo’s interior design feature was done by Thom Filicia, Queer Eye’s “Design Doctor,” who just signed a contact to serve as a spokesman for Pier 1.