Mixed thoughts on the model-less mag.

First order of business today: Apologize to your five faithful followers.

Here it goes. I'm sorry.

Turns out I haven't posted since Labor Day, and while I am not a seasoned blogger, I know that I have dropped the ball. If this blog were a relationship, I made the classic mistake of acting interested for a short period of time then "accidentally" becoming too distracted and busy by other bright and shiny objects to follow up in a timely manner. Woah. Clearly I have digressed...

So what I mean to say is, I messed up.

Now that that's out of the way back to "the thread."

If you happen to be thumbing through the January 2010 issue of Brigitte, a popular German fashion magazine, you might notice there will be a bit of a change. I discovered through the Twitter feeds yesterday morning that the magazine has announced in the coming new year they "will no longer be using fashion models on their covers or any of their inside features."

Hm. Really? So you might be wondering, "well who will they use?"

Folks, hold onto your butts... they will use ordinary people, actually "friends, relatives and staffers."

The news release explains that this is a movement to start promoting "real" women in everyday life instead of the impossibly cigarette-thin supermodels already saturating the magazine stands. At first I commended the editors of Brigitte. Then I get to the part of the release that also talks about cost-cutting measures in these scary times in publishing. Ah, and there it is... the truth.

So now I am torn. My initial reaction was gratitude to the magazine for taking action against an industry who has turned perfectly sane women and girls into body-image obsessed gym bunnies. I won't lie. I too flip through an ELLE or VOGUE, and the instant I see Gisele barely clothed bust out at least 100 crunches.

But the other side of me, the woman in publishing who struggles to maintain a product that advertisers want to invest in, sees this new initiative as temporary. I believe it will be damaging to the product (which might I add is 90 percent advertising) with an editorial piece using a "real" woman as the art element, then to flip through the next five pages and see Gisele-like creatures in the Louis Vuitton, Juicy Couture and Marc Jacobs advertisements. It's an inconsistency that won't fly with readers or advertisers.

Yes, I'll admit it, when I finish with those 100 crunches and realize I still don't look quite like Tom Brady's main squeeze, I go back to that magazine, say "eff it" and read the words inside. I see magazines as a less expensive coffee table book that I can rotate out quarterly with a new stack of youthful, fresh and hot faces. I love that they are full of cigarette-thin models wearing clothes that I will never be able to pull off, but still dare to dream. So in the end, I guess I say "nay" to the model-less magazine. It's my escape into a dream world of beautiful people. I don't live there, but can't I just indulge from time to time?

But we shall see. I could be wrong. This could kick off a huge campaign throughout the magazine publishing community where "real" women take over the slick, and the supermodels now find themselves in line at the unemployment office with the rest of us.

(Disclaimer: This blog post may seem to speak negatively against Gisele Bundchen, but for the record, she was purely the first example that came to mind. I do, in fact, adore her.)