Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 22

20 Popular Culture Review beautiful and smart, beautiful and independent of men, beautiful and old, as age was mistakenly understood in the past-that is, before Lear's, a time when the woman over 40 was unwilling to admit much less celebrate her age and beautifying exjjerience. Lear's pioneered the use models over 40 in their fashion photography, and the practice has found its way into other nuigazines and some advertising. There is certainly some justice in acknowledging the beauty of women over 40; indeed there is no denying it, as we look, for example, at the Lear's covers of Diana Ross or Joan Collins or Glenn Qose or Jacqueline Bisset. This democratization of physical beauty, however, serves only to extend to those over 40 the general culture's commodification of women, perpetuates the practice of making women the objects of a gaze that remains principally male in its definition. From the outset, one of Ae continuing themes in the Lear's letters column has been the question of facial lines and wrinkles, an inescapable physical consequence of aging. Was Lear's going to acknowledge photographically this physiology, or was it going to erase or severely modify this code of aging with heavy-handed use of pancake and airbrush? The women pictured in Lear's are clearly older than those in most women's magazines and, to be sure, some few lines and wrinkles appear, but these people are remarkably well preserved, in the main the beneficiaries of sophisticated cosmetic and photographic art. Lear's declaration that "In our fashion and beauty pages, all models reflect the ages and looks of Lear's readers" (March 1988) is plainly not so, as is apparent to anyone who will simply look at the ordinary run of humanity over 40. Lear's, even in its most candid moments, is a renaissance mirror, reflecting idealized images whose paradigm remained firmly rooted in the youth culture the magazine declares it is resisting. Lear's does not seek to thwart or replace youth culture, but rather to co-opt it. The magazine seeks to allow women over 40 the opportunity to participate in the youth culture not so much on their own terms as on the terms of the youth culture itself. The declaration of difference is described in the collapse of difference. ni: Modernist Foundations Despite the postmodernist play on the surface of Lear's, the magazine remains on balance firmly grounded in the tradition of