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take on Elle Girl
Now here's a teen fashion title that gets it right
By Jeff Bercovici
In the magazine world, as elsewhere, spinoffs have to work extra hard to get any respect, and knockoffs have to work even harder.
As a spinoff of Elle and a knockoff of Cosmogirl and Teen Vogue—themselves spinoffs of Cosmo and Vogue—Elle Girl would appear to be starting life with at least two strikes against it.
But what it lacks in originality of concept, Elle Girl more than makes up for in rightness of execution. As a teen magazine, it's quite good -- funky and fun, accessible without being condescending, inclusive without being painfully PC.
But it's as a fashion magazine that Elle Girl really distinguishes itself, deftly addressing all the shortcomings that make Vogue, Harper's Bazaar et al. such an annoying lot.
A word of disclosure: This writer is decidedly not a member of Elle Girl's target demo, being neither a female nor a teenager, and not much of a fashion plate.
But you don't need to be a WB-watching ninth grader to appreciate what there is to like about a magazine as fun, practical and unpretentious as Elle Girl.
Credit the magazine's fresh feel to the editor in chief Brandon Holley, who came to Hachette not from elsewhere in the incestuous world of teen publishing but from GQ, where she was a senior editor.
Elle Girl's first issue, with Julia Stiles on the cover, appeared last fall. The new spring issue has singer Gwen Stefani on the cover, and although she is 32, it's hard to think of someone who better embodies the magazine's motto, "Dare to be different!"
What other celebrity glamour girl would attend an awards show with neon pink hair and braces?
"Dare to be different," far from being an empty slogan, is the organizing principle of Elle Girl's fashion coverage and the main strength of the magazine. Other fashion magazines tell readers, with varying degrees of explicitness, "Buy this stuff and you'll be cool." Elle Girl’s message throughout is, Having your own style is what makes you cool.
The best fashion pages are in the front-of-the-book "Global Girl" section.
The mini-trends showcased here are simple: bright red tops, customized T-shirts, pigtails. What makes them come alive are the models-- ordinary teenage girls from all over the planet: Hong Kong, Brazil, Holland, Norway.
In other words, 15-year-olds who look like normal, happy 15-year-olds instead of like starved, depressed 22-year-olds (although you can find a specimen of the latter on pages 100-103).
As "Global Girl" shows, Elle Girl is international and multiethnic in its outlook to a rare and admirable degree. Instead of the usual tokenism, what you get are pages filled with black, Latina, Asian, South Asian and Middle Eastern faces (as well as, of course, European ones).
When Teen Vogue debuted last spring, much was made of how it imported Vogue's ultra-luxe aesthetic to the teen category, displaying $700 rabbit fur vests and the like.
Fashion editors like to talk about this kind of thing as the "fantasy" or "aspirational" component, the idea of being that even readers who can't afford such indulgences like to imagine owning them.
In reality, of course, the showcasing of "fantasy" items is more a sop to advertisers than anything else, and for readers it more often results in gnawing envy than pleasurable daydreams.
Elle Girl seems to understand that teenage girls don't need to be made to feel any more insecure than they already do.
Though there are some splurge items featured, especially towards the back of the book, most of the merchandise on display is affordable on an after-school job salary, with much of it provided by discount retailers like Old Navy and H&M.
Better yet, many of the suggestions are for do-it-yourself modifications to clothes the reader already owns. Parents, in particular, ought to appreciate the way the magazine encourages thrift and resourcefulness over credit-card chic.
That’s not to say that the styles in Elle Girl are tame; far from it. Indeed, that, above all, is what makes Elle Girl work so much better and what makes it so much less silly than grown-up fashion magazines, which devote so much of their space to cutting edge runway looks that are out of the question for any adult with a job or a reputation.
While only the most ridiculous fop of a 25-year-old would be seen wearing, for instance, a mask on her arm as an accessory (p. 46), a high-school alpha girl will do it, and she’ll even pair it with the rainbow legwarmers.
After all, expressing yourself in outrageous, even frivolous, ways is what being young is all about.
March 21, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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