BRIEFLY, let’s discuss:
(via vanity fair)
and i’mma take like the wonkiest of wonky angles here…
WHYCOME VANITY FAIR????!?!
no, but really.
VF is known for being the venue in which jennifer aniston told us brad pitt was missing a “sensitivity chip.” there’s good gossip on its dc blogs and on the royals, that hollywood issue they publish every year around the oscars as well as, like THREE DECADES of covers about dead people.
seriously.
historically, VF has been where you go when you want new dirt on old people.
and, when they featured young, living people, those people also often were modeled to evoke old, dead people…
i associate VF with a distinctly vintage-y vibe is what i’m saying.
this may be changing.
i see that, with the end of the interminable graydon carter era, they are trying to rebrand and so have featured an alarming number of living people on their covers in the last few months, which, well, yay.
the publication has a slightly different history in it’s coverage of men though, which comes into play here in confusing ways.
there is, of course, this EPICAL ralph fiennes cover of yore.
which it is our human responsibility to never ever forget.
there’s also this tommy cruise winner from the height of his beauty days…
(my #1 life rule is never trust a man in a turtleneck, but i’m willing to make an exception here.)
i’d never much thought about the construction of masculinity in VF, but there’s a there there.
with very little wiggle room between toplessness and t-shirts apparently- excepting the middle way of an open blazer without a shirt.
i wanted to know why o’rourke would do this tease in VF. i wrote all this because i wanted to answer the question why VF– the magazine of dead people and kennedys?
is VF cool? is VF the magazine all the hip people are reading now? is this where we expect our hip candidates to come from?
but, seriously, why would VF be the route through which you’d do the finale tease of a presidential campaign you’ve been teasing for months?
there are no norms now so perhaps i’m being a fuddy-duddy. perhaps i’m missing something. perhaps beto has correctly read the room. but it seems an odd publication from which to run, no?
but then, it’s a tease. and VF has, historically, been about the tease, done stylishly and well. the promise of stylish secrets reveled, stylish confessions, stylish gossip, stylish muscles. so maybe that’s the fit.
as a white man who wants to run a presidential race and believes he was born to run a race to be president, of all the publications one could go to to announce that one has that belief and plans at some fortuitous point in the immediate near future to take up the mantle of one’s destiny to do that, it seems VF is it.
bully for him.
i keep returning to this though…
an alarming life 