What’s in Vogue—Saving Money
Women’s magazines are a guilty pleasure. Sure, I had the
requisite subscription to seventeen as a tween. I read cosmo through college
until I confirmed my sneaking suspicion that the magazine simply recycled its
stories every two years and I had finished reading any remaining original
content. Still, while I showed up at
the hair dressers packing my laptop and my work reading, I never had any
intention of cracking open that book.
Instead, I would sit there for a half hour developing my color and my
knowledge of trashy celebrity gossip, sex tips, and fashion advice. And what overpriced fashion advice it is.
Yet for the past twelve months I have been a Vogue reader,
courtesy of a miss-mailed subscription that the mailman insists of delivering
to the wrong box. So despite the fact
that I haven’t invited any magazine other than Wired into my home for years,
I’ve spent more time than I have since high school consuming perfumed ads,
counting the number of pages of advertising I must flip through to find a table
of contents, and wondering enviously how Plum Sykes manages to make enough
money to pay for her expensive boot habit.
As someone who scores most of her finds at the local thrift
store (theory camelhair and cashmere turtleneck!) or Nordstrom’s rack (Edlman
and DJ Pliner boots!), even the prices in Lucky
magazine seem ludicrous. Vogue is a veritable shit show of how the
other half lives. I can’t really lose
myself in the pages of a magazine whose ads remind me of CNN: where products
and services I will never purchase (Really, Boeing?) are advertised.
Sometimes as I flip through I fantasize about what I would
actually want. If I made one splurge
purchase what would come home with me?
But then that price tag and its requisite dollar signs dangle before
me. Which do you covet more? Sky high killer heels or those sky high
killer bills? One of them definitely
makes my debt look fat. Much like Domino
(the best magazine ever) folded because its readers simply copied the magazine’s
killer looks for less (which happens when you have a readership of DIY divas),
I read Vogue not for product advice
but the styling. And so I tear out the
occasional picture or ad, and let it inspire me as I go shopping in my own
closet. Because I can definitely afford
that.
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