Every so often there comes along a new idea that sends purists shrieking. That's the last straw!  The world has gone to the dogs!
    In magazines, Maxim and its brand of bad-boy laddism was the most recent example, and its exaltation of what my grandmother called the "base appetites" drew pious cries of indignation.
      That the complainers tended to be those who already catered to a quasi-sophisticated T&A crowd--the GQs, Esquires and Details--made the spectacle all the more amusing, kind of like watching all the Republicans who persecuted Clinton being outed for adultery.
     Maxim was lucky.  It rode a buzz-wave from England, the country that exists to give us ideas that impoverish our national culture, so the Brits can continue to feel superior to us. It hit a cultural shift to Stockbroker Style --big steaks, big cigars, big knockers and big paychecks.
     Now James Truman and Conde Nast hope to get lucky with girls with Lucky, "A New Magazine About Shopping," as the tag puts it. 
     Truman is the Brit who put the tit in Details by hiring Maxim's editor Mark Golan, an experiment he quickly came to rue.  Whether he has better luck locating the pulse of today's It Girl is the question.
     He's clearly hedging his bets, making clear in a press release that Lucky will be on the newsstand for three months, along with a complementary web site.
    It's sink or swim time, baby.  If it's going to work, Lucky has to hope there's a mod squad of compulsive shopping babes who somehow will find time (and money)
to click that mouse big-time.
     Could happen.  But does the product deliver the products?
     Let's take Lucky for a test drive:  The cover sends a big signal to shoppers everywhere: a brunette with tousled hair giving an over-the-shoulder come-hither look. Her powder blue bra strap is showing, along with a price tag descending from an armpit.
     A pricetag is nothin' but a number, and there are plenty of them on the cover:  "More than 700 great finds," "11 pages of nothing but shoes," "71 cool stores," "39 must-visit web sites," "245 summer looks," and so forth.
     The Table of Contents is a crisp grid, so simple as to feel dumbed-down: "Hot Tickets," "Ask Dr. Shopper," "Jeans and Tees."  But since you can't be too thin or too simple where shopping is concerned, call it a plus.  
     There are hints of real stories, too: "Four Girls One Shirt" and "Dress Code: The Gym."
     Okay, so we're not talking National Magazine Awards here.
     The real innovation, or gimmick, is not the tie-in with the dot.com but the page of 29 peel-off sticky tabs with which you're supposed to mark your must-and maybe-haves.  
   These blue-gray Post-Its (there's one flesh-colored one, for beauty products, I assume) could be quite handy for the Bridget Jones-Sex in the City clonettes out there.  Although here, it must be said, editor Kim France and her marketing team missed a major promotional opportunity. 
     I peeled off every single tab, figuring that underneath one would be a special reward just for me.  You know, a free blush sample, a rebate on Eternity, or even a trip to Jeffrey's, the fashion warehouse down on 14th Street.  Well, there wasn't anything there, and I am one disappointed fellow.
     (This brings up a gender issue which ought to be dealt with, I suppose, forthwith.  I am a guy.  This is a woman shopper's mag.  So who cares what I say about it?
     The short answer is: I read Seventeen alongside Boys Life growing up, with disastrous results during Boy Scout troop inspections.  The long answer: I once bought my wife, sight unseen, a Polish couture dress from a boutique on East Ninth Street back in 1989 and it fit, and she still wears it.)
    But let us proceed further through the pages of Lucky.
    Hot Tickets puts an editor's face on the usual picks pages.  Fashion director Andrea Linett chooses four blue-themed thingies, market editor Sharon Anderson picks four white-themed thingies, accessories editor Anne Keane daringly does two colors on her page.  
    The look is clean, and the use of a fashionista's name and face introduces a theme that we see throughout the issue: lots of girls romping around giving you the voyeuristic sense of their lives, their fashion, their impeccable hunter-gatherer instincts.
     The following Style Spy pages don't click as well.  The opener is as tacky as a K-Mart flyer.  The Who's Buying What Where tries to give a regional fix for Houston, L.A., Portland, Chicago and New York, but the giddy chart look has lost its edge.  Everyone does it, and in so many ways, that the eye glides and moves on. 
    Are the picks on target?  One would hope.  But there's no fun in it.
     Another K-Mart page follows.  I asked a woman editor friend, whom I call The Media Psychic because she's seen through it all, for her take.  She said: "There's no angle, no opinion, no information on these pages.  It just shows the goods.  They don't bother to take a position."
     You could say that sums up a certain attitude that prevails in fashion books, but in the good books their readers usually are knowledgeable and demanding.  They like their chic photo, a bit of narrative, an attitude.  Here Lucky gives you fashion credits.
     This brings up the selling point of Lucky, which is that it's all sell. The advantage over fashion magazines is that it cuts to the chase.  No relationships columns; the relationship is with the store, or the shopping pal.
     No advice, except to show what you can get.  No articles, except for photo-narratives like "Run of the Store," in which girls run amuck in a closed-up Barneys, trying on this and that, with lots of titillating glimpses of panties.
     So does it work?  Do we miss the wrapper, or are we happy just to get the fish?
     The Beauty pages are straightforward grids of products arranged by skin type.  The Design pages focus on a couple of rooms, with insets explaining how to make a Crate & Barrel lamp work with some Ikea stools and Danish leather chairs.  The usual magazine fantasy is at work ($12.95 stools always look good in 1,000-sq. ft. living rooms with shoji screen walls, etc.).  But the Getting Organized page gives the game away: staplers, desk clocks, tape dispensers.  Is this a magazine for assistants to the Market Editor?
     Of course, the real style-setters often are the indefatigable assistants, but magazines don't necessarily want them as readers.  Lucky is smart enough to have it both ways: tap into Fashion Assistant Style, but earn your real salary and perks to boot.
     The Web Shopping pages show their independence by immediately dissing a Martha Stewart pick, but then give the site a thumbs-up.  There's a nice roundup of sites here, but none gets much of a workout.  Then again, Wall Street hasn't shown it can do any better at evaluating these things, and they get paid a heck of a lot more than Conde Nast editors.
     What Conde Nast editors do know how to evaluate is shoes, and here is Lucky's piece de resistance:  11 pages of shoes.  The five spreads are shot with an intensity of focus that delivers the fetish feeling and look.  I stared at them and could feel the longing they could inspire.
     After that we take a tour of faux-supermodel territory, visiting a gym (clothes, bags, ointments, jump ropes, tank tops), taking a little trip (pack a bikini and a sundress), cruising a pet store for the proper puppy (various breeds stacked like hirsute Kate Mosses on white cubes--must have been hell to style this shoot). 
    Then we do another photo-narrative, to the tune of "Goodnight Moon," some Lucky guy getting lascivious in a threesome.  Of course, it's not about sex, but shopping, so the guy may end up with nothing to show for all his charge card slips.  Or he may end up looking fabulous.
     The Instant Authority revisits the chart look with a Wine for Dummies approach that does little to impress.  (Fashion Assistants drink whatever's free, or else order the house white.)  
    The Delectables page of desserts must be there to torture the models into behaving well on the shoots.  But the Shopping Trip to London is a real value: spreads on three boutique-intensive spots (Notting Hill, Brompton Cross, Knightsbridge) with maps.  This is one where the Conde Nast style teams earned their stripes and polka dots.    
      In sum, then, Lucky is hit-and-miss, but not slapdash, with enough spot-on moments to trigger a grudging thumbs-up.  It is riding a number of buzz-waves, and may offer a form of convergence to those tired of reading a half dozen magazines and a dozen catalogs while visiting all those websites.  Like the gizmo that allegedly makes sense of your TV/VCR, Lucky promises to save you time and frustration, in this case while keeping you abreast of those who spend their days hunting chic bargains.
       Will it go?  Well, first it has to be noted, in the name of journalistic accuracy, that Lucky has a period in its name and logo, i.e., 'Lucky.' is the correct name.  Do we pronounce it Luckydot?' 
    The media world waits with bated breath.  In the meantime, take your cues from the TOC's tease:  'No issue is too trivial for Dr. Shopper.' 
    That's a direct steal from Flaubert, folks, who once said: "God is in the details."
      If Kim France and her crew can get the details right, and enough people notice, then Lucky may stick around.

-Don Wallace is the magazine critic for Media Life.


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