Glossies Aren't Anything New

So, we've just updated the site, and there have been some additions to the gossip section. However, there wasn't room to go into a load of detail, so I figured I'd make up for it here, starting with some thoughts on glossies and court journals.

Glossies scrutinize celebrity dress in the same way that Court journals of the past criticized the dress of aristocrats at Court. Diaries and letters between Court ladies reveal the pressure and judgement placed on dress. During the reign of Charles II in the 1660's, the Duchess of Newcastle was notorious for her bizarre fashion choices, and was the author of Poems and Fancies. Dorothy Osbourne unsympathetically wrote of her in a correspondence, "First let me ask you if you have seen a book newly come out made by my Lady Newcastle; For God's sake if you meet with it, send it to me; they say 'tis ten times more extravagant than her dress." This is almost the same level of bitchiness found in Vice and Glamour's do's and don't's these days.

"Wow. Carrying around a jambox is one thing, but how into yourself have you got to be to set up an entire throne for your personality and read A Clockwork Orange while smoking cigarettes (he even brought his own little pocket ashtray with lid) like you're living out some 8th-grader in detention's fantasy of what living in New York is going to be like? The bottom half of his mirror must be permanently frosted in jizz."-Vice

"The peekaboo fabric with nothing but undies underneath? A save-it-for-your honeymoon Don’t."-Glamour

These sorts of criticisms have remained unchanged as this copy of Heat magazine confirms. Like Heat claims of these celebrities, Samuel Pepys' wrote in his infamous diary in the 17th century when his cousin began wearing rouge on her cheeks, "Still very pretty, but paints red on her face, which makes me hate her."

KR