Hearts and Hates

These are a few of my favourite ... magazines



Nylon

Oh Nylon, I can hardly resist you, even when you feature Camilla Belle on your cover (I still don't really know who she is). I think the first issue I ever picked up featured Paris Hilton on the cover! and when I flicked through I found the article was insightful and genuine. While it can have a little too much of an over-aware-"it's IRONIC"-hipster vibe, I like the way they interview famous ladies, point me in the direction of bands I now love (The Teenagers!), and have travel snippets.
They can be very self-aggrandising and overly advertisement based but their good parts make up for their bad parts.
Also! I NYLON was my magazine of choice for my carry-on bag when Sir C & I departed New Zealand in May 2007.


(you can see half the O and the N poking out)





Lula, Girl of my Dreams

Oh Lula, el-you-el-ah, Lula,
I read about Lula and searched for Lula and yearned for Lula long long before I met her.
I was in the Borders store on Charing Cross Road on my lunch break when I spotted her. I gasped a little and grabbed her so quickly that the producer (I'm guessing) of the film crew panning over the next shelf down looked over and smiled at me.
Lula, girl of my dreams, comes out only a few times a year but is a weighty tome, printed on high gsm matte paper it feels almost more like a book than a magazine which almost, almost makes the wait between issues bearable.
It has been guest edited by Kirsten Dunst, featured Zooey Deschanel, and has the most amazing photography within it's pages. It reads like your best friend is telling you about all all all the wonders she has discovered, and she has amazing taste.
And oh, the title is apt. The overall aesthetic of the magazine is ethereal and dreamlike, full of girls whose eyelashes reach the sun before their faces. Muted colours, redolent of high summer in a very very hot region, long grass, dandelions & wheat, denim shorts, floating tops, and long long sun bleached hair.
Also! I was drafting this entry, long hand, this morning and I took a break to check on twitter (obsessed!) when I noticed that Darling Amber from Code for Something had reviewed the latest issue! I wasn't even aware it was out yet in Nouvelle Zélande. But $31!!! My goodness.





Grazia (UK)

Only £1.90 and issued weekly! this was my staple in London and I'm finding it hard to cut off now that I'm in New Zealand, it costs $2.50 more than the Australian version, has all the wrong season's fashions from stores that aren't in New Zealand (yet? I hope. I miss H&M) but I cannot help it, I love it so.
The problem with other wholly fashion magazines (magazines in this post excepted of course) was that you would inhale them in one or two sittings an then there would be a month before the next one came out. An absolute age! Until Grazia came along! A weekly magazine that didn't feature gardening, tips to keep your marriage alive and children happy, purely puerile paparazzi phoyos or anything of the ilk.
There are features on celebrities, and some are quite similar to the Katie's Scientology Sex Camp! (for example) but they are tempered with high (and high-street) fashion, and world news articles.
An admission. I do ABHOR that they use the terms "Recessionista" and "Cheap Chic" as often as they do. But no one's perfect!
And why do I like the UK version more that the Australian? I think the fashion is a little more runway-based than beach-based, a little more fashion forward. And GAUS (as I like to think of it) is a little closer to the Cosmopolitan et al formula which is so tiring all those articles about snaring a man with "wild and crazy sex tips", or how "some women" are flirting their way up the company ladder. I find them absolutely exhausting. I just want Giles and Vivienne and Karl and the Mulleavy sisters! and of course, to know how to get the look for less.





frankie
And, at the top of my list, my girls-in-white-dresses, favourite magazine, is frankie.
Apparently aimed at the 20-something demographic, I only came across frankie when I was in New Zealand for Christmas 2007, and I was smitten, kitten!
Combining the best bits of all the others listed on this darling little post, frankie is art-y and alternative without being self-referentially hipster, it is dreamy and ethereal without becoming weak and mired in a vaseline-lensed world, it is full of fashion and fun without being too mainstream or resorting to grating catch-words. And I never ever realised this until right now, write now.
But! in addition to all of that, they are crafty, they include recipes and a poster (usually by an amazing artist like Rob Ryan) they feature quirky collections (like vintage salt and pepper shakers), and people with careers where, either the career is similar but the people are diverse, or the careers are diverse and the people similar but always always always these career features are linked by the absolute passion the people have for their jobs, they do what they do because they adore it, love it, live for it and yet again, BUT! the career is not necessarily alternative, or creative, it's not all musician, photographer, fashion designer. They feature Doctors and Lawyers and Librarians and Tattoo Artists all the same. It's about passion.
I feel like fankie is not simply geared towards single women with a lot of disposable income who go out most nights and definitely every weekend, instead, being predominantly a homebody who occasionally likes to knit, and also likes tattoos, is completely fine by them as long as I love what I'm choosing.
I like a magazine that makes me feel better about myself!




Sigh. Payday is tootoo far away, there are new issues of Lula and Frankie calling to me. I can hear them.



p.s. What I DO NOT HEART? when my beautiful Zelda ring decides all of a sudden to turn my finger dirty dirty black.




(photo taken in terrible terrible light with the flash and everything, so the actual black line is 3 times as dark, I promise.)

Bad ring! Very very bad ring.