Before any of you bypass this entry because either you are a man and don’t care about women’s clothing (or your own for that matter) or you are a woman and don’t read women’s fashion magazines because you think they are stupid, please consider this: I often start down Trail A and end up somewhere totally different, and if you choose not to journey with me down the love-hate relationship that I have with fashion magazines, you may also miss anecdotes that only I have to share. A further preface: those of you who know me well or have ever helped me move know that I love VOGUE, and I have a significant number of these magazines dating back to 1990 lining the walls of my basement. It’s a lovely collection, an intriguing look at history, and when I die, my husband has promised to sell them all on eBay and donate the proceeds to charity. Furthermore, because VOGUE and W, the other fashion publication that I subscribe to, don’t always print my letters, I thought I would just publish them here instead. Now for my first:
Dear W:
About your March issue: I am going to compliment you—exceedingly—because I am vastly pleased with your content. The color, the variety, the creativity—I’ve been waiting for a reputable fashion publication to produce something like this for months, and now you’ve done it, and I hope you keep it up. There is only one negative comment worth making, however, so I will make it because that is what I do. It concerns this:

The thoughts of these two women must be as follows: Natalie Portman says, “I have nothing to offer in terms of my chest, so they splashed this bedraggled-looking character across my front so that no one would notice, and it really pisses me off.” Scarlett Johansson, on the other hand, says, “I’ve got boobs and a dog. So there.”
I am also curious about those pseudo-dickeys strapped to their necks. Yes, they could just be elaborate neckties or collars, but for the love of all things civil, those things ARE NOT ATTACHED TO THEIR TOPS, so they might as well be dickeys. And if you don’t know what a dickey is, then (a) you’ve never seen “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” during which Cousin Eddie saunters into the Griswold Family living room in a white leisure suit and a black dickey; (b) you were born post-1982 and are unable to recall the slight resurgence of the dickey in the mid-1980s; or (c) all of your blood relatives know you well enough never to give you one of these things as a gift and think that it is ACCEPTABLE. Point c is a true story that occurred several years ago (I think I was in college, but to keep from using the word “decade,” we’ll pretend that it was during my later college years) when we went to my paternal grandmother’s house for a Christmas visit. My mom, my sisters, my dad, and I made the 1.25-hour trip all squeezed into my dad’s Ford Crown Victoria, my mother doubtless asleep in some disfigured position in the front seat, my sisters and I crammed into the back while the unknown phenomenon known as “Why the Hell Is the Back Seat of A Ford Crown Victoria so Uncomfortable?” made our rear ends feel as if the seat were eating our underwear—happened every time. Anyway, each year we made this journey, my sisters and I always received a small, identical gift from our grandmother—a notepad, a pair of socks, some gloves. That fateful year, we opened our gifts to discover black dickeys. I didn’t even know that they still made dickeys in the late 90s, much less that a single store would stock at least three! I’m not sure how my sisters and I kept our shit together. But once we got back into the car, my mother turned around and said to us: “I just want you girls to know how proud I am of you because you didn’t laugh when you opened those dickeys.”
Which leads me to the present question: why would W magazine promote the dickey? I know, this isn’t on the same level as the middle-aged peasant woman of 1984 who kept her outfits “hip” by changing up her dickeys (see here for examples). But still, this is a frightening cousin to the detachable bosom of wardrobe, and I think it’s best left where we last saw it, you know, with stirrup pants and the like.
As always, my dear editors at W, thanks for listening.
Marge