Meme Day - Part 2

My initial reaction to Wende's Fashion Rag meme was, "Hm, if anybody actually has anything to say about this, I'll be very interested to hear the answers, but I bet nobody does." I'm not sure my answers are interesting, but here they are.

1. What's your favorite magazine on "women's" issues, e.g., fashion, beauty, relationships?
None. I've never read any regularly, or even often enough to be able to tell the difference between them. At the salon, etc., I'll sooner look for something more shelter-oriented, even if it's Better Homes & Gardens. Whenever I've ingested the fashion, etc., material, it's most often been from the internet. The rise of the populist web coincided with late high school for me, so perhaps if I were a bit older I would have read more magazines.

2. If you do read 'em, what gives your favorite its status? If you don't, why not?
Why not: the way-over-the-top sexuality they all feature so prominently. Aside from the "I don't need that garbage" factor, it indicates a foundational worldview quite different from my own, so how useful would any of the advice actually be for me anyway?

3. What's the best piece of advice you ever got from a fashion magazine?
Everything I know about makeup I probably learned from magazines (and the occasional library book, and the web), because nobody ever taught me. Considering how few of them I've ever read, I suppose I'm fortunate to know anything at all.

4. What's the first fashion magazine you can remember reading?
Honestly no idea. Sometime in my late teens they stopped feeling so much like declasse contraband, and I decided I didn't need to feel guilty if there was no Readers' Digest available in the dentist's waiting room.

5. What's your most memorable experience with a fashion mag?
1. Hanging out with a high school friend who was obsessed by magazine quizzes and had accumulated enough of them to keep us occupied all night after a school dance.
2. During college - one very memorable instant messenger conversation with dearest G (my guy friend) when he discovered that Cosmo had gotten something right about the male mind. As I recall, the article asked something like, "What physical trait in women do guys find most important/attractive? Hair, legs, earlobes, or what?" Cosmo came to the brilliant conclusion that Different Guys Like Different Things. This was a breakthrough.

6. What fashion mag have you read regularly for the longest stretch (at any point in your life)?
NA, unless you count the few months I used a gym with a subscription to Lucky, which contains nothing but pictures of pretty things to buy. I don't remember exactly when that was, but I recall lots of photos of candy-colored leather.

7. What beauty moves cause you, in retrospect, to laugh nervously and change the subject?
I've probably worn too much makeup on a few occasions...and not enough on others...but honestly, I've never habitually done anything distinctive enough to be embarrassing. As a child and adolescent, I was convinced that being outlandish, or even style-conscious generally, was juvenile and pathetic. As a result, until I was old enough to buy my own clothes, I wore a lot of things that I utterly hated, because telling my mother that yellow corduroy was really not the done thing in the third grade would have undermined my self-imposed concepts of respectability, and I decided it was better to suffer through it and wait it out, since even then I knew I would eventually become a Real Person (i.e., an adult) and allowed to dress myself without risk of being found precocious. On the upside, I never had feathered hair or body glitter, and only wore blue nail polish to pep rallies.

8. Would you change your image if you were a different size?
Unlikely. Individual garments might change, but the basic concept would hold.

9. Are you ever going to post a picture of yourself?
Not more than I have already, unless I come up with an extraordinarily good reason.