- Lindsay Lohan © Marie Claire USA
Celebrities and Fashion have always been synonymous. However, today more than ever, fashion magazines are featuring more celebrities than immigrants trying to get into the USA for their Green Card. In many cases these highly regarded magazines are using celebrities more often than Super Models for their covers. There are many reasons for this and in my opinion some of those decisions have more to do with the Politics of Fashion than the notoriety of the Celebrity.
Why is it that some of the Biggy Fashion Mags don't feature Super Models, but do feature Celebrities from all sectors of the Entertainment Industry? I believe that it is because they can't get the Super Models for their magazines. In fact their are very few magazines that can get Super Models and find it a lot easier to get Celebrities to adorn the covers of their ELLE's, Marie Claire's etc...
It is true that Celebs sell and can attract a large audience, but when it comes to the giants vying for THAT Top Model, that is where only a few of the Biggies like VOGUE, Harper's BAZAAR, ELLE and a few other more obscure, but none the less important magazines like Numéro, V and perhaps L'Officiel can get on occasion.
- A Fashion Cover with Super Model Constance Jablonski for Harper's Bazaar Spain - April 2011 © Nico
Of course many would argue that the reason that this or that fashion magazine are shooting Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears or Paris Hilton is because they sell magazines. That may be true, but I am quite sure that if all of the major and lesser influential fashion magazines attempted to compete for the creme de la creme of the modelling industry and could only get models and not celebrities, that the King of the heap would surface really quickly. You would see immediately by the standard of the models acquired who really rules the game.
Thus again the reason why Celebs act as a great draw that diverts the attention from the obvious omission from the covers of "Fashion" Magazines of Top Models. Why would a major fashion magazine want to be judged by their peers and the public based on the fact that so and so was on this magazines cover but not on theirs? Celebs are a kind of "Hey we have Paris on our cover wearing Gucci" and not "Hey we could only get so and so and so and so competitor Fashion magazine knows that we could only get so and so because of you know why..."
- I am not saying that celebrities should not be on magazine covers. I am saying that a Fashion magazine should be a Fashion Magazine and not a people magazine. Models are part of the Fashion landscape and I am hoping that we can get back to the epoch where fashion magazines did what they did and did it well and leave the people's magazines to People Magazine.
There are only very few mags that can pick and choose who they put on the cover and for the right reasons! As a caveat, there are some trendy press magazines that can get top models like Muse, Dazed and Confused, Self Service, I-D and a few others, but that has more to do with other issues that could easily take up at least 3 major blog posts. The business is like a humongous Spanish onion, with more layers of complexity than Einsteins theory of relativity.
And lastly, celebrities seem to be more accessible than agents representing those models most of the fashion magazines would love to get on their covers but won't. They and their PR people understand that the exposure they garner being seen on the cover of Redbook could aid in them getting their next big part in that 2012 blockbuster "Calender's End"*
So the next time you see the cover of a magazine with a celeb on the cover, you may want to ask yourself, "Did they because they wanted to, or because so and so didn't want to".
* (I made that up)
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