Fashionable Foundations and the Feel Good/Feel Bad Story

Although People may be a gossip magazine, it has not lost its roots in fashion and what fashion can say about the people who use it.

On June 20, 1977, People published an article following the story of Roy Halston Frowick aka Halston, fashion designer to the stars. He is depicted with Liza Minnelli and Elisabeth Taylor as a man on top of his game and of the beauty industry. No scandalous comments for the man that was making some of America's starlets into fashion icons.

















Halston 1977

Yet 13 years later, an almost identical picture shows up in an April 1990 edition with an entirely different spin. It is a shocking transformation: People will do an in depth story on the fall of Halston from fashion genius to... AIDS victim.

It is interesting the way People reappropriates the positionality of a victim of this disease. Halston is immediately othered. The headline of the story reads, "Like Fitzgerald's Gatsby, He Was a Mysterious Midwesterner Who Shone Brightest at Night. Then the Parties Stopped". Returning to this idea of a quintessential Americanness (one of high modernism and inaccessibility), People once again proceeds to make the reader pity in light of his public scandal. They play up his glamorous lifestyle then show how certain lifestyle choices caused him to die tragically ill. Of course, Halston was 57 at the time of his death. The choice to picture him as he was emphasizes the significance of his demise and causes the female reader to identify with a gay male counterpart. You can see in Liza and Liz Taylor's body positions that they are looking up to him in admiration as we look down on him in shame.







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Halston 1990

It may be exploitative of People to talk about the death of a star, but you will notice that death and anticipation of death, especially from AIDS became a big a story in the 80s. With the murder ans assassination attempts on John Lennon and Ronald Reagan shocking alarming the nation, it was important for People to take up some of this conversation and place it in the laps of women across the US.

One way to do that was to hit them where it hurts: with another ideal image of American beauty.

Alison Gertz, a society girl from the Upper East Side, contracted HIV on her first sexual encounter and was given the opportunity (unlike many minority groups throughout New York and the world) to tell her story. Gertz had gotten the disease at age 16 from an older, bisexual man (two things you want to shelter your kids from) and been living for years with the disease before it fully manifested as AIDS in her immune system. The article harped on the fact that she was "an unlikely candidate" and that "no one is safe" to push their readers to identify with this beautiful woman and her struggle of victimization. She is, by definition, a victim in this depiction as if it was pure coincidence or happenstance that she would have ended up with the wrong man.

Perhaps it was because of her good up-bringing that Alison Gertz made it on the cover of People Magazine, but are these the only images of AIDS that women of the US can relate to? Gertz is notably healthy looking in her photos. She is young, rich, and beautiful, apparently on top of her disease. She never talks about the pain or the sickness. She only talks about how came to this sad place, a road that anyone can stumble on. So yes, People may have pushed some of the more open female minds to go out and get tested, but once they came back negative, did they gain any greater understanding of a disease that was ravishing the nation?

Sadly, Gertz died two years later from the effects of her disease. A movie was made in her honor, starring Molly Ringwald and targeted to pretty, young teens.