From the time I was a teenager, I knew I wanted to work in magazines. I read them religiously—my mom’s Texas Monthlys and New Yorks, my older brother’s Rolling Stones, and then also of course Seventeen, to which I subscribed and with which I was obsessed. I knew all of their favorite models by name—this is Jayne Modean—and when I saw this cover the other day, as I was wasting time online, it took me hurtling back to the summer of `77, and fantasies of crisp fall days (of which, in reality, there were few to none in Houston) and wooly, preppy separates like the ones Jayne was wearing on the cover.
Seventeen’s big fall fashion issue wasn’t a September issue but an August one, and I have keen memories of molten-hot July days when I’d walk down our long dirt driveway to the mailbox, my hair tragically afrizz, hoping against hope that it had come. Its eventual arrival was always a highlight of my summer.
When this particular issue materialized in our mailbox, I was 14 years old, and about to enter my last year of middle school. I was very sheltered and highly suggestible. I wanted my life to resemble the lives of the girls in Seventeen; I wanted my bedroom to look like the bedrooms featured in its pages. I wanted to be perfectly, evenly tan like the girls in Hawaiian Tropic ads; as softly approachable as the girls in those (really creepy in retrospect) Love’s Baby Soft ads. I wanted to look like Phoebe Cates did in a swimsuit, and the fact that I didn’t do any of those things made me feel kind of bad. It might have been the first time a glossy magazine made me feel less than, but it wouldn’t be the last.
Still, I was endlessly inspired by Seventeen too, and subscribing made me feel vaguely as though I was a member of a club that probably wouldn’t have me as a member if they knew me. Still, I felt as though, if I followed their health, beauty, relationship and fashion tips carefully enough, my life would eventually resemble the life lived in its pages. I might even get a boyfriend. None of this happened, by the way.
This thorny dichotomy in my brain—between being inspired by magazines but made to feel inferior when my life didn’t measure up to them—would last for years, and persist even after I knew all their dirty secrets, and even, a little, after I actually ran one.
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