OK. The New York Times Style magazine is not
my go-to section. But this last past Sunday, August 25, I thought that maybe I
should take a look. One more time, take a look, see if anything had changed,
see if the models still looked...well... miserable. I did find a very
happy looking guy, on page 169, selling Andrew Fezza ware. That was a nice
change of pace. And there was Andrew O'Hagan's article, Laws of
Attraction. "No one can deny the glory of youth, but when a woman's
experiences can be read on her face...it is then, and only then, that her true
beauty appears," I read this and was hooked.
"There has probably never been a period so
youth-obsessed as ours: we speak of unlined faces as we once spoke of noble
minds..." I liked that, too. By the end of the article, I got the
part about the beauty of youth and the loveliness of aging with confidence and
intelligence and the part about women nowadays maybe doing a better job of
combining looks and intelligence, feeling better about themselves.
But I was puzzled, too. Very puzzled, and I wondered a lot about the
photos accompanying the article. Were they really Mr. O'Hagan's choice, and if
so, what was he thinking? Weren't there any available photos at all of
beautifully grown women?--They exist. I know they do. But rarely, if ever, in
this part of the newspaper. How odd. If the choice was not Mr. O'Hagan's then
who was it at the magazine who could have been so laughably (and rather
pathetically) out of touch with what's out here in the world, as well as, so
wrong about the gist of Mr. O'Hagan's article? Who was it who thought
that photos of young women would make a good match for an article about the
beauty of old (older) women? Is the fashion world really that afraid? A photo
of a woman with wrinkles or a woman with a figure? O shock, o horror. Can
someone there at the magazine or newspaper explain this to me? What century is
this?
