The Chronicles of Marge

A Closer Look

Dear W:

Your February issue has presented us with the floating head of Brad Pitt. As well as a close look at his pores, which sent me straight to the bathroom where I inspected my face for, like, an entire hour in the mirror and surmised that although my pores may indeed be larger than Brad's, my salary is still smaller. I also have fewer children, equaling exactly zero, and I've never gotten to see my bare chest on a movie screen. The latter of which, I'm sure, is a great disappointment to The World.

However, regardless of what I may think of this cover or its contents, W, you've made me look more closely at my life and come to peace with the very important above-mentioned realizations, for which I thank you.

Sincerely,
Marge

Hope Your Dog Enjoyed It

Dear W:
Your September cover announces the season’s sleekest, sexiest looks, but apparently they look like this:

And although I'm not done with you, W, I shall now address our friends at the US Postal Service. Dear postal service person: what the hell? Were you so pissed at lugging 5 pounds of high-fashion gloss around in your mail truck that you decided to feed it to your dog first? Did it make you feel good to throw Kate Hudson's face around for a fun game of fetch? Did your heartstrings sing a bit when the spine severed in two? Did you let forth a maniacal laugh as your best four-legged friend made fringe out of the Balenciaga ad? And yes, I'm not a particular fan of the Balenciaga ads this season, but its f'ing Balenciaga, dude. SHOW SOME RESPECT. And also show me some respect because if it wasn't for my addiction to big-ass magazines, you might be out of a job, for as much as it could be rather interesting, you can't carry the Internet around in a stamped envelope and put it in people's mailboxes on a daily basis. Gosh.

And W: your September cover is rather clown-like, but I will petition for a replacement issue nonetheless.

Thanks for listening!
Marge

A Lesson in Gravity

Dear W:

The cover of your July issue pleases me tremendously, merely because it doesn’t contain the image of some actress or famous-for-nothing celebrity who's displaying the depth of her acting talent through the amount of decolletage she can expose for the camera. This nearly decade-long trend tires me out because it's a grand waste of precious artistic space—that is, the cover of a fashion magazine. In addition, you then subject us to reading about the trials and tribulations of having so much money and so much convenience that it overwhelms said actress and sends her to the brink of rehab or even into rehab. I mean, they are REAL PEOPLE TOO, damn it, and get tired of being asked questions about their PERSONAL LIVES because, of course, they didn't ask for any of this, least of all to be interviewed by W magazine.

Anyway, the trio of models is great. Yes, I could do without Kate Moss who is ubiquitous and whose bangs look worn out and heavy and could one day lead back to this trend:

 

Sweet lord, I hope this NEVER happens again.

Nevertheless my joy at models on the cover of a fashion magazine will not be overshadowed, even when you take into account that the included fashion editorial is just a so-so Bruce Weber ode to Americana. I don't have a problem with Bruce, except that he often can be a bit too Abercrombie and Fitch with boobs, and we get a lot of the latter in this spread—which I don't mind. Actually, the timing for the delivery of this issue to my lonely mailbox was rather convenient because my sister and I were discussing, just this week, the state of our boobs. Namely, we wonder, at this point in our lives, where should our boobs be? Here we are, women in our 20s—how lovely that I can still apply that age bracket to us both—already pondering the effects of gravity, especially astounding, as neither of us possess a rack to write home about—as if I've ever even used that term when talking about my chest. And then I behold the pages of W, filled with perky and perfectly shaped boobs that seem to withstand the force of gravity, and I realize that I must be past my prime, which can only mean one thing: a return to bras!

I’m lucky to have lived a braless decade. Round about my senior year in college, I realized that all of the straps and under wire and clasps really served little use on my figure other than to slowly torture my upper rib cage. And then I met a guy named Jason who filled me in on the fact that it wasn’t the bras that excited the male sex, but what was underneath the bras, so why bother? And I didn’t. I think I can confidently say that I lived almost two years with nothing between me and the world but a layer of cotton—up top, at least. And I never thought twice about it. Until I got a job, and then I wondered what to do with my girls. Again, what little I had remained perfectly in place, but it just didn’t feel professional, so I discovered the camisole, which, I thought, would set me on a bra-free existence for the rest of my life.

Until recently. That band of elastic in the camisole just isn’t performing as it once was. Possibly it has to do with the fact that I wear the same two camisoles all of the time, and the elastic is shot and covered in all those little tiny balls of fabric particles and whatnot that come from lord knows where.  But possibly the problem is the girl and something entitled “Aging, A Very Natural Lesson in Gravity” written by My Thighs. And then my sister brought up a good point: maybe years of camisole wearing have expedited the process. As she so insightfully put it: “I feel like I’ve done myself a disservice.” So here I am after years of neglecting my boobs thinking that it’s time to get them back up there. Granted, no one will notice. And regardless of how I push them up, the area of my chest that I liken to the Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah will still be the same—you stand in the middle of a vast and empty plain and the hills are far in the distance—and this anti-gravity experiment will be for naught because no one will give a shit, least of all me.

But thanks for listening nonetheless, Dear W.

Yours truly,

Marge

To the Editors of W Magazine

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