Allure Magazine 1991

Although Allure Magazine has a short, 18-year history, the premier issue and second issue covers look vastly different from the covers we are used to seeing today. In my analysis of the March 1991 and April 1991 issues I found four interesting themes for discussion; secrets, multicultural or ‘other’ women, allusion to plastic surgery.

“Secrets of a Makeup Artist” and “Secret Lives of Thin French Women” appear on the March and April covers, respectively. The notion that access to western hegemonic ideologies of beauty and thinness are both secretive and exclusive, and controlled by an elite few is actually constructed in the same way as the majority of our visual culture. Those with money and power control and distribute, while the masses internalize and accept, and can emulate and strive to embody. Additionally, by calling the information that both make up artists and French women possess are secrets that must be revealed or exploited to make the reader more beautiful displays our cultures obsession with private information and perhaps the precursor to magazines’ obsession with celebrity and covers reflecting that.

“Moscow Faces: Beauty Bulletin” and “L.A. Beauty: All Natural Artifice” are problematic headlines for various reasons. First, the term “Moscow Faces” has some disturbing connotations. The magazine groups an entire culture of eastern European women into “Moscow,” or a recognizable Russian city. The term “faces” shows that this group is not worthy of terms such as people, individual, women, or females. They are only as good or valuable as their face is pretty or beautiful. By detaching the face from the person and stereotyping hundreds of millions of women as “Moscow” completely objectifies and exploits them. Also, looking at Moscow from a historical and political perspective, the year 1991 was a short time after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and perhaps because not as much information was known about the women of these lands makes them more alluring, intriguing and ripe for commodification. The issues with “L.A. Beauty: All-Natural Artifice” stem from the idea that to be beautiful in L.A. is to be entirely composed of plastic. The word artifice denotes a clever trick or stratagem; a cunning, crafty device or expedient. With the beauty ideal being “all-natural,” this headline displays that yes, it is possible to look all-natural, but to do so, you must devise a deceptive plan (i.e. injectibles, plastic surgery) to achieve this look. In summary, according to Allure Magazine, all Moscow women all have the same desirable look, which can be emulated through specific make up techniques, and all women in L.A. look naturally beautiful because they have great plastic surgery.

In terms of the actual images or photographs of the women on the covers, they are very different than the ones we’re accustomed to today. First, on the March cover only five inches of the model’s face is shown, whereas today we generally see a recognizable celebrity, expensive clothing and jewelry, in an exotic location. In this image, we simply see the model with the ideal blue eyes, gazing upwards and outwards. The gaze is not toward the consumer, and does not attempt to draw in the reader through a direct gaze. Perhaps this gaze signifies striving, determination, attempts to achieve, or images with which our culture associates hope. Allure magazine understands a woman’s desire and struggle to be the ideal and by reading the magazine the woman is one step closer to achieving the ideal. Conversely, Allure uses a different tactic of interpellation through the sun-kissed, nude model with flowing blonde hair gazing seductively at the reader. Directly below her the text reads “Hair of the Moment” signifying that you too can be blonde, skinny, and sexy lounging on 600-thread count sheets by achieving the hair of the moment.