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