Vogue India
MEMO TO ANNA WINTOUR
Dear Anna: I'm Outsourcing Your Job To Vogue India. 8 Pictures That Explain Why…
Anna: Trust you're having a merry Fourth. Please don't let what I'm about to say put too much of a damper on it. Listen, you've been impeccable these past 20 years. You're British, everyone fears you, there was that movie, etc. etc. And let's face it: in your absence, everyone who works here will probably start eating again and that's bad for health insurance premiums. But when in the course of human events you have to cut off the clothing allowance of an old paramour, well…you give them the good news first! It's not Carine. No, I'm actually giving your job to Priya Tanna, the editor of Vogue India. Have you ever looked at Vogue India? I hadn't either, really, but the other day I was in Bombay or Mumbai or whatever they're calling it these days for a business meeting and it occurred to me that the whole reason we have ceded so much of the old "service economy" to them is that they know English there, and if they know English I might be able to read their magazines, not that stylish prose was the first thing on my mind when I walked into the newsstand and found myself face to face with the most fucking wildly gorgeous specimen of femininity I have ever seen. It not being some overspackled underfreckled overexposed celebublonde, it took me awhile to process that it was Vogue I was looking at.
See, all this time I'd been assuming the developing countries would always imitate the useless consumption fads and phony neuroses that comprise the sorry substitute for purpose we call "lifestyle" around here. Otherwise, what is the West even good for? Well, funny you should ask, because I have an answer for that: nothing. We are good for nothing. Because I opened the fucking magazine, Anna. I couldn't not open it. And in a few flips of the page I almost regained my belief in something I should know better than anyone is a cynical con designed to sell shit to insecure women and perpetuate a lucrative unending cycle of the creation of new wants, which is to say: beauty. Beauty, of all things! Seriously, I was surprised as you. But check her out.
