I love magazines. I seriously can’t get enough of them. I subscribe to everything from Red (a perfect example of a good grown-up women’s magazine) and the American edition of Glamour (I’m not a fan of the UK version, but the American one is so fun and inclusive and surprisingly feminist) to less frivolous mags like the New Yorker and the London Review of Books.
There’s nothing new about my love of magazines – I’ve been reading them and their predecessors, comics like the Beano and Mandy, f
or as long as I can remember. And when I was a teenager, magazines were hugely important to me. The teen magazine Just Seventeen didn’t just entertain me and my friends (and provide us with lots of pictures to cut out and turn into the collages that covered our homework notebooks), it was almost our sole source of decent information about sex and relationship matters. I kept reading Smash Hits, the absolutely hilarious pop magazine, long after I’d discovered indie music and stopped listening to chart hits (by the time I was 16 I was also a devoted reader of the NME, saving every single issue under my dressing table). And as my teens went on, buying fancy grown-up magazines like Vogue made me feel, well, a bit more grown up too.
But although I loved these magazines, I never felt like they were really talking to me. My friends and I were really into music and books and slightly odd stuff like old 1950s teen movies, and the likes of Just 17 were all pretty mainstream. And while we devoured the NME, it tended to assume all its readers were (a) male and (b) older than 16.
Then, when I was 17, I discovered an American magazine called Sassy, and instantly fell in love. Finally, a gorgeous glossy magazine that assumed its readers were interested in more than just boys (though they assumed, rightly, that most of us were indeed interested in boys too), that they had a sense of humour, that they were smart. Sassy encouraged its readers to start bands, to get into feminism, to read a lot, to understand politics as well as fashion. It had been founded in 1988, but didn’t reach Irish shores until 1992, which was when I found a copy in a city centre newsagents. I religiously bought every issue after that, until, in 1994, it mysteriously vanishe, never to return. I was heartbroken and bewildered by its disappearance; it wasn’t until several years later that I discovered it had been sold to a new publisher who fired all the staff and relaunched the magazine, filling it full of features on how to get boys to like you and how to look like bland supermodels.
There’s never been another Sassy, but recently teenage blogger Tavi Gevinson (who, despite the fact that Sassy folded around the time she was born, is a huge fan of the magazine) launched a website for teenage girls called Rookie. And although I’m no longer a teenager, I recognised my former self in the new site. And I bet that there are girls out there who are going to read it and feel the way I felt when I first picked up Sassy nearly 20 years ago: this is for people like me.
Still, I can’t help wishing it was a paper magazine rather than an on-screen one. Because there’s nothing like sitting black and flicking through some gorgeous glossy pages. Am I alone in this? What magazines do you love?
Great post.
I love Mizz and Hello and, the new mag, The National Enquirer.
(i love celebs, might be unheathy for me though.)
Thanks, Laura!
I agree about how most mags go overboard with boys and celebs, but I do like to pick up Mizz once in a while! I am going to look at Rookie now, it sounds great for me…
Wow, I love Rookie! Lol
Yay, glad you liked it! It’s so smart and funny. I loved it even though I’m about 20 years older than its founder, which makes me feel very old.
Never heard of Sassy, but wow, what a picture of Kurt & Courtney! (I belong to the love-him-loathe-her-camp, btw). I was mad about Jackie from about 12 to 14, then it was Company and Cosmo, then in the 80s THE FACE. And iD and Interview, because I was young & pretentious. And Vogue. I used to LOVE Vogue. Alas the UK one has been incredibly boring now for a very long time, Alexandra Shulman has drained it of any innovation or surprise…there was a time when it was Cutting Edge. Now it’s just another fashmag crammed with celebs…yawn. Now that I’m an old fart, I like Elle Decoration and….yes, I hereby confess…occasionally I buy Good Housekeeping. Argh, I’m never going to live that down. Erm, it has good recipes. And clothes for real people. OK, shoot me now.
Fiona, I bought The Face and iD after gorgeous-holiday-boy (unfortunately named Malcolm) was reading them. I found them utterly baffling.
iD – me too! But I was an avid reader of the Face, way back when Julie Burchill wrote for them. She was one of the highlights.
Ah, the Face. I bought it through the latter half of my teens, when made me feel VERY cool. I stopped buying it when I was in university, which I suppose was a few years before it folded. UK Vogue is indeed pretty boring these days (though they still do the odd decent shoot, unlike the American version where everyone is airbrushed into waxwork-ness). As far as mainstream glossies go, US Elle is really good – excellent, innovative fashiony shoots and great features.
And that really is a great cover, isn’t it? It’s the only magazine cover (and possibly even shoot) they ever did together. Sassy was beloved by a lot of cool musicians – they got the likes of Thurston Moore and Mike D and Iggy Pop answering reader problems..
I love it: Iggy Pop as agony uncle. Excellent! Next you’ll be telling me he does car insurance ads…oh, hang on…
I like the Jacqueline Wilson magazine, it’s really fun, I like reading the cringes and rating them, they’re really funny! (Well most of them are anyway.)
When I was younger I used to like babyish magazines like Sparkle World and Pink. But now I’m more into reading books, unlike my cousin who’s completely devoted to Jacqueline Wilson, (I’m not gonna say her name in case she strangles me) and she has got every single issue, and has read all her books!
I like quiz books as well, well my mum likes them anyway.
hikma i;m gonna starngle u
and excuse me i’m not devoted 2 her!
and what do u meen unlike my cousin
i’m am sooo much more interested in reading books then u
BTW every1
i taught her how to read as she used to find it boring!
can u believe it!
yeh i like the jacqueline wilson mag and i Natuional Geographic kids is good 2
click my name every1!!!1
I loved reading this post, and Rookie is brilliant!
Thanks! And it really is great, isn’t it? Tavi is brilliant. She could have grown up to be such a monster, being feted by the fashion world from such a young age, but instead she seems really grounded and smart.
me and hikma and our friend fatima r making our own mag
were not sure what to call it yet
but we’ve done quite a lot of issue 1!
anyway our parents our gonna help us publish it so if its published it shud be in the shops soon!
hopefully!
That’s very cool! My sister and I did a little magazine – called a ‘zine – when I was about 17 called Projecto-Jane, and we had a lot of fun making it. Good luck with the magazine – let us know how it goes.
The Disney Princess magazines were the best! Then as I got older, my friend and I moved onto Mizz. We read and collected it religiously for many years but then it started to go downhill, which was such a shame.
Now I like to read free magazines haha. I think free magazines are often a lot better than the ones you pay way too much money for.
Rookie is brilliant! I couldn’t wait for the magazine to be launched and I love reading the posts daily
xo
It’s great, isn’t it? I think it’s very cool that so much of it is written by teenagers themselves.
Brilliant Post! I too love magazines. Their aren’t many magazines around for 12 year olds (YAY! It’s my birthday today so I’m 12!!), because you have Girl Talk which is too young and then Bliss which is too old. It’s lucky we have Mizz and Top Of The Pops, which are a bit trashy, and my mum checks there is no make-up as a freebie, but its ok.
I don’t know if any Girls Heart Books girls remember a magazine called ’4girlz’, it was around for about a year.
I loved that magazine. It was so different.
1) The freebies weren’t make-up,instead it was pens and paper and things like that.
2) I won a competition for my family to stay in an amazingly posh hotel for a few days.
3) It was about 4 girls, real girls, who were going through situations. One was in the middle of being a girl and a woman, one was moving to secondary school, and I can’t remember the other two.
4) The models for clothes were real girls, the actual 4 girlz, and the clothes were things we could afford, in New Look or Claires.
5) It didn’t gossip about celebrities, instead the girls met famous politicians and went to hospitals and found out about careers.
6) The features like room makeover were of the girls’ rooms, and the mag was run by one of the girls’ mums.
Then suddenly, one day, the magazine just stopped. I don’t know why. It just did.
It was a beautiful, inspiring magazine that taught me things today.
I’m not being offensive but today’s magazines are all celebrities and models and boys. Why can’t we learn about real girls?
Orli
xx
Happy birthday, Orli! It’s my birthday tomorrow so hurrah for September birthdays.
That magazine sounds like it was fantastic, and it’s very disappointing that it stopped. I don’t think online mags are a good enough substitute for printed ones, but I do think that Rookie sounds like something you might like. It’s definitely encouraging girls to be creative and kind and interested in the world around them, and the design is great too.
that mag sounds great
i wish it still existed!
I remember 4girlz, Orli – it was great!
That’s so cool, Luisa!
Do you know why it stopped?
I worked for years on ‘Just 17′ (my boyfriend-now-husband worked on ‘Smash Hits’), and it was fun AND very hard work. But I remember ‘Sassy’ coming into the office one day, having a flick through, and thinking it was just amazing! It was smart and incredibly funny and laidback and hip. I still have a couple of much-treasured copies from those days. So I’ve very intrigued by ‘Rookie’ – will go and nosey at it now!
Oh my God, working at Just Seventeen with a boyfriend who worked at Smash Hits? I am retrospectively extremely jealous of you both! My best friend and I bought Just Seventeen religiously in the late ’80s and very early ’90s, but much as we loved it, Sassy was definitely more “us”. Still, it’s Just Seventeen we can thank for pretty much our entire sex education on everything apart from the very basics. Irish convent schools in the late ’80s weren’t big on advice about stuff like what, for fear of corrupting younger readers, I will carefully call “heavy petting”.
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I REALLY wish I’d found Sassy. I read Jackie and then Just 17, only ditching the latter when they did a Chinese Astrology section and didn’t include an animal for my year because I was TOO OLD. (I did take the ’17′ a bit literally…)
Since then, I’ve read Cosmopolitan, Red, OK, Hello and, um, heat. But none of them religiously and mostly at the hairdresser. The mag I get every month without fail is Olive, so I can drool over pictures of what our tea’s SUPPOSED to look like.