Style/fashion

EYE magazine, where hipness met consumerism, was a brief candle amidst the flickering lights of the 1960s.

EYE magazine was a short-lived (15 issues, 1968-69) effort by the Hearst Corporation to cash on the exploding youth market in publishing (and, of course, in advertising profits).  The rainbow logo, with its echoes of Peter Max and  ”Op” art, gives you a hint right away.  Hearst was already publishing Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, House Beautiful, and Harper’s Bazaar– and EYE, it seems, was largely meant for younger, female readers, to judge strictly by the advertising in this issue:  makeup, perfumes, hair products, more makeup, handbags, and a Wonder Bread (”Helps catch boys!”) ad inside the back cover:  ”Don’t forget this: boys love to eat. And they love Wonder sandwiches.”).

The Beatles–two of them, at least–and “Beautiful Persons.”

This issue features counterculture superstar John Lennon, in an oddly unmemorable (not to mention poorly focused) photograph by Linda Eastman, already gaining a reputation for her portraits of rock musicians.  He and Paul McCartney had been in New York in May for a whirlwind visit in connection with the creation of Apple Corps, their new company.  Their “101 hours” in New York are chronicled by Lillian Roxon, the Australian journalist who would soon be publishing her “Rock Encyclopedia,” a landmark in rock history.  Roxon was a Contributing Editor at Eye, and was responsible in this issue for two other pieces.  The first is a feature called “Elevator: People on the Way Up (and Down),” in which she calls the reader’s attention to 27-year-old “Mike Cimino,” who had just won the award for the World’s Best Television Commercial (a spot for Eastman Kodak), and who had his eye set on doing something big in Hollywood.  (As Michael Cimino, he would direct The Deerhunter and win an Oscar in 1978).   The second is an embarrassing one-page sermon on “Cosmetics of the Soul,” described as “the art of being as beautiful inside as outside. . . . Whatever you want to call it, it’s what everyone wants to be these day.  A Beautiful Person.”

Glitz, glamour, and guys with money

EYE was well known for its high-quality inserts:  foldout posters of celebrities, a record, a comic book (Spiderman).  In this issue, there are record reviews, a car review (the Bond-ish Lotus Europa), a fashion spread (fake furs, sexy models), an article about flying a glider, an interview with Jean-Luc Godard, an excerpt from Tom Wolfe’s best-selling The Pump House Gang, an article about student radicals, and a gushing profile of four under-30 male entrepreneurial success stories, with the guys posing together in a bank vault: “Members of a generation in a hurry . . . not likely to stand still waiting for Success to happen.”

The conquest of cool

Though it was a brief candle in the life of Sixties publishing, EYE might well stand as Exhibit A for the “rise of hip consumerism” so well documented by Thomas Frank in The Conquest of Cool (1997)–the rather rapid “discovery” that hipness and the counterculture were easily converted into commodities, and could be effective bandwagons for making money, even for corporations as historically identified with the conservative Establishment as Hearst.

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One of the most famous covers of the 1960s:  the spectacular Naomi Sims appears on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal.

In November 1968, Ladies’ Home Journal-- ”The Magazine Women Believe In”–featured  the first black “cover girl” in the history of this long-lived and influential magazine, the first, actually, on any “mainstream” (i.e., white) women’s magazine.  The cover was in the news very recently, illustrating the New York Times obituary for Sims who died August 1, 2009, at the age of 61.  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/fashion/04sims.html?_r=1

When she appeared on this cover in 1968, Sims was not an unknown: she had appeared the year before on the cover of a Times fashion supplement, and by the next year was seen nationwide in an AT&T ad campaign on television and in print.  But still, the LHJ cover was big news, coming toward the end of a turbulent year in American race relations. The Journal had been the most prestigious women’s mag since the turn of the 20th century, far outpacing rivals McCall’s, Redbook, and Women’s Day, if not in circulation then certainly in cultural significance and influence.

A complete woman

And it’s a great cover shot:  She’s wearing a crocheted outfit–very much of the moment, but something that “even a beginner could finish in eight hours.”   Sims’ dark skin is amply revealed, and her long (5′10″) body is curled up and perfectly fitting into the rectangular outline of the cover:  ”This is a complete woman,” the photo seems to say: “Black is Beautiful.”  She was 21 years old.

More than just a pretty face

The LHJ editors knew what they were doing when they hired her.  She was not going to be just a mannequin for that crocheted ouftit, assigned the usual mute role for cover girls.  No, this was a Culturally Significant Moment, and the editors gave her not only the cover but a huge spread inside, and an “exclusive interview” with editor Diana Lurie.  The interview begins slowly, cruising around details about what’s it’s really like being a model, then it gets to the elephant in the room:  race.  ”My mother felt that the Negro was inferior, and she lived in poor white neighborhood [in Pittsburgh].  In kindergarten, I can remember being the only Negro in an all-white school. . . I get questions all the time about being Negro.  I hate having to be made aware and always having to use my brain about being Negro.  After Martin Luther King’s assassination, somebody said, ‘Now you’re really going to work, baby.’ . . . Beauty does surpass prejudice at a point, yet sometimes the effort people are making to assimilate us seems contrived.”

Stereotypes don’t go away overnight

If Sims’ cover appearance was history-making, the rest of the magazine seemed still to be treading the water of racial stereotypes.   African Americans appear in exactly two other places in the entire 200-page issue, both of them advertisements: An ad for Samsonite, in which a black luggage porter is helping a white damsel-in-distress at JFK Terminal; and an ad for Calgonite dishwasher detergent with the caption “The prettiest dishes in America use Calgonite,” and 34 headshots of apparently “average” pretty American women (the “dishes” of the caption, one assumes), four of whom, remarkably, are black.

And finally, how many people, I wonder, in 1968 noticed the stunning, almost perverse, contrast presented by the BACK cover of this historic issue of Ladies’ Home Journal?  Here it is, without comment.

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