March Deep Dive: Mademoiselle Magazine
Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, and Betsey Johnson walk into an internship program.
Using every ounce of energy we had left, Nico and I stood perfectly still in the Hudson News. We stared bleary-eyed at the magazine offerings, hoping for some glossy paged sartorial pick-me-up after a long weekend away from home.
There were a few tabloids about Prince William and the-artist-formally-known-as-Prince Harry reconciling their differences… a few businessy Forbes offshoots… one publication simply titled WITCHES, which promised to outline “8 Ways to Use Graveyard Dirt”.
We paid for our $5.25 bottles of water and plodded to our departure gate.
There is a specific set of criteria I demand from a magazine: incredibly styled and photographed fashion editorials, at least 2 articles of substance, plenty of perfume samples for me to smell, and, for a bonus point, a personality quiz. I really don’t feel like I’m asking for that much???
During my informative years, I was a hardcore mag reader. There wasn’t a Teen Vogue, Allure, or Nylon safe from my scissors and bedroom wall. I stared at each issue like a young girl staring at a pack of teenagers. It felt like access to something cool, something grown up, something potentially within reach.
I’m going to wax poetic here about a women’s magazine, yes. But this discussion is more than listicles about lipstick and articles like “Seven Steps to Transform Yourself into the Woman He Wants to Marry” which, yes, did grace the pages of this very magazine in this very 21st century. It lived from 1935 to 2001, expertly straddling the fence that separates frivolity from more serious topics. It published literary pieces from authors like Truman Capote, Albert Camus, William Faulkner, and James Baldwin. It also published covers with headlines like, “Romantic fashions, for spring, for brides, for tall girls”.
Mademoiselle is a cultural touchstone that encompasses the complex dichotomy of womanhood. And not just in its pages, but also in the process of getting those pages to print.
Every summer, Mademoiselle hosted an essay writing contest in which 20ish college-aged women could win $500 and one month in New York City. My cursory understanding of this Summer program was that these women won an internship at the magazine, but through my research, I’ve learned it’s something wholly different.
These girls were called Guest Editors, and they worked together on a special College edition of the magazine, published once a year at the end of the Summer. They stayed in a famous women-only hotel called the Barbizon, and they were expected to live out a month in New York City worthy of writing about. Depending on your specialty (fiction, shopping, fabric, etc), you spent your days interviewing influential people, receiving private tours of the UN and/or attending private parties at Condé Nast. You might be a Sophomore at the University of Missouri, never been on a plane before, and now you are hailing a cab in Midtown, drinking a Tom Collins with JD Salinger (apparently he was always lingering at the Barbizon bar, trolling for a wife), and attending the Milliken Textile Company’s annual breakfast show at the Waldorf-Astoria. These guest editors were even treated to a full makeover at Saks. And then, after your return home, your written words went out to millions of young women around the world.
Some of the program’s notable alumni include writers Joan Didion, Meg Wolitzer, Mona Simpson, Ann Beattie, Diane Johnson, Francine du Plessix Gray, actress Ali MacGraw, and fashion designer Betsey Johnson (Can you imagine Betsey Johnson as a young person?? To me she has always been 70 years old and cartwheeling down the runway).
Maybe I’m projecting from my own NYC internship experience, but I am just amazed at the amount of trust and respect given to these girls. Their voices were truly valued. They published their honest opinions on topics like fashion, art, and literature. A huge corporate entity knew that the way to appeal to young, ambitious women was to empower young, ambitious women. I just think that’s so cool. It is so cool.
But it’s also (trigger warning from this point forward) tinged with danger and darkness.
There is an inherent irresponsibility in the release of 20 cherubic faces to the proverbial concrete jungle. Of course, there were rules posed for them by their temporary employer and houser (rumor has it that wearing pants was forbidden at the Barbizon, and at night the male elevator operators were swapped out for female ones). But I mean, deep down. Who was looking out for these girls?
The most famous of these summer Guest Editors is Sylvia Plath, who immortalized her experience at Mademoiselle in her 1963 novel The Bell Jar. She changes her name and a few cursory facts, but otherwise, the telling is pretty accurate. Sylvia was experiencing a creeping depression when she arrived in New York in the summer of 1953, and what should have been the most liberating month of a lifetime turned into the catalyst for the inescapable agony of just being alive.
Here she is on the first day of her internship, and a passage from her book that recreates the scene.
‘Come on, give us a smile.’
I sat on the pink velvet loveseat in Jay Cee’s office, holding a paper rose and facing the magazine photographer… I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry but I knew that if anybody else spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week….
‘Show us how happy it makes you to write a poem.’
— Plath, Bell Jar, chapter nine.
This cognitive dissonance is tough for me. Nowadays, we have enough knowledge about mental health to know that you can’t tell what someone is experiencing inside just by looking at them. But Sylvia’s smile here feels so genuine, yet she is experiencing a deep darkness within. You would think that spending a month of freedom in the city would be nothing short of exhilarating and self-affirming.
Sylvia’s summer at the Barbizon was the beginning of the end for her. If we are to take her character’s experience in The Bell Jar as a roadmap for real Sylvia’s experience, then it is clear that she suffered a sexual assault while in New York. After the incident, she climbed to the Barbizon rooftop and threw her clothes to the street below. Upon her return to Massachusetts, she began a series of electro-shock treatments to assuage her depression. After years of battling with inescapable darkness, and an obsession with her mother’s mortality, she eventually took her own life at the age of 30.
Meg Wolitzer, a Mademoiselle guest editor 26 years after Plath, writes about her time at the Barbizon:
The contest was a lovely tradition that was stuttering, staggering. No one could know yet that all magazines would eventually be threatened by a technology that in innocent 1979 we couldn’t even begin to imagine (we with our cassette players blaring Blondie’s “Heart of Glass”)… The summer of 1979 seems to me now to resonate with loss. It was perhaps inevitable that the magazine decided, after our year, to end its historic contest for good, making us the last Guest Editors ever.
It’s true that nothing lasts, and I didn’t need to win a magazine contest to understand this; I surely knew it before that summer, helped along by Plath. For a certain kind of arty girl, reading Plath was like reading the French existentialists. She let us see that the way we felt — that ache of being alive — was something that other people felt, too.
On the last night of the guest editorship, a few of us staying at the Barbizon went up to the roof and held a weird, impromptu ceremony in memory of Sylvia Plath, uttering a mumbo-jumbo incantation.
It was ironic and jokey and I suppose a little ghoulish, but it was mostly meant to honor a writer we loved who had come before us in another summer, and lived where we had lived, and worked where we had worked, and had even, like us, allowed herself to be made over, though the makeover was superficial and didn’t change anything for her in the end. She had gone out into the world, and hadn’t survived long enough, but somehow we had a feeling we would.
In November of 2001, the final issue of Mademoiselle was published. After that, its subscribers would receive Glamour. I can’t think of a publication that honors its readers like Mademoiselle did with this program, except maybe Rookie (RIP) or Tumblr itself. Their understanding that young women want shopping tips just as much as they want essays by Camus must have been so affirming for those lucky enough to pick up a copy every month.
While I remain disappointed by the magazine options in Concourse C at the Seattle-Tacoma airport, I will leave you with a list of publications doing really cool shit today. Don’t see your favorite on this list? Please tell me what it is, because I’m taking my collage scissors out of retirement.
L’Etiquette - this French twice-a-year magazine mostly specializes in everyday menswear, but more recently they have been incorporating femmes alongside the hommes. They interview designers and tastemakers (like Fran Lebowitz and Mike Tyson in the latest issue... lol).
BRICKS - based in London, BRICKS is both a gorgeous print magazine and a year-round online platform discussing fashion and art through a social-political lens. Their latest print issue is all about age.
The Gentlewoman - a lifestyle as well as a magazine, The Gentlewoman publishes a physical read twice a year (the next one comes out on 3/21 and has Julia Louis-Dreyfus on the cover). It also runs an in-person club with fashion-y events, and even collaborates with designers on mini collections.
Vestoj - self-described as "a research platform and the leading public intellectual in the field of fashion." Vestoj is hyper-intellectual and GORGEOUS. The photography is truly something to behold. They also operate as a think-tank and research platform, offering events and experiences in both the corporate and public space around Europe.
Novella - the closest offering on this list to a true zine. The latest edition of Novella is all about romance, including an essay on the history of the wedding dress, a piece about costume and dress in romance fiction, and a cool art piece using deconstructed romance novels.
Monument - every issue is focused on one particular designer or label making waves in Dutch fashion in 1998. So... it's hyper-specific. But that's what makes it so cool. It is laid out beautifully and each edition is as special as a coffee table book.
See you next time!
xx Ruby