MadMag: Glamour Re-Imagines Iconic Women

Glamour Magazine just turned 70 years old and instead of hitting the seafood buffet as I would have done, decided to celebrate by rehashing the last 70 years, including doing a photo essay on iconic American women.

There are a lot of snarky things that can be said about this particular feature: the bizarre combination of fictional and historical figures (with the omission of more interesting and/or controversial real women like Betty Friedan, Coco Chanel, Ayn Rand, etc), the laughable captions (such as the explanation of “holding a sign that reads “strike” in Spanish” for America Ferrera’s pic), and then, of course, the very obvious fact that Glamour chose people who will probably be ultimately historically insignificant to portray these icons. I think what bothers me the most is the haphazardness of the feature: no real attempt was made to match models to icons (Emma Roberts for Audrey Hepburn, whaaaaaaa?), with similarly lackluster styling and sets, so the whole endeavor seems relatively pointless.

Thoughts? Personally, the only ones I can remotely get behind are the Alexis Bledel and Chanel Iman ones, if only for relative verisimilitude.