Quick thought about the new Love covers

Quick blog post this afternoon, as my CMS at work is down and thus have been handed a free extended lunch break.

So, have you seen this?

Well, this, 8x.

Love Magazine (y’know, the one that put the outsized, in girth and personality, Beth Ditto on its cover for its first-ever issue) is putting eight naked supermodels on its “Fashion Icons” issue, due Feb. 8.

On its own, it’s not much of a crime. Fashion editorials in which clothes are out of frame are pretty par for the course, so there’s not much to be offended by at this point. (Though I still contend there should be — replacing fashion’s primary concerns with aesthetics, form, art with that of the human body, etc. etc.)

But then Katie Grand had to open her big fat yap and try to explain what was a mostly innocuous, kinda cool cover concept:

“For this issue of LOVE, we took eight women who are generally acknowledged as the most beautiful in the world, got them to show off their bodies — widely regarded as the most perfect in the world — and photographed them all in exactly the same position for the cover,” LOVE’s editor-in-chief Katie Grand told VOGUE.COM. “We did this to show how much they differed physically from one another, which is why we also printed their measurements.” (via The Cut)

Oh, okay. So you’re taking the eight most beautiful, genetically blessed women in the world, whose jobs are to fit sample size clothing (and thus, more or less have identical bodies), and comparing the minutiae of their forms? Yeah man, Kate Moss’s legs are stumps (or is that only because she’s a mere 5′ 6″ compared to her giantess peers?). Or maybe that youth is so fleeting that Moss — who was discovered TWENTY-TWO years ago — scarcely looks like a decade has passed, or that Naomi Campbell — who was discovered 25 years ago — looks better than my not-yet-24-year-old self. If you want to bring out the sociological hand-wringing, yeah, it’s problematic because readers could see this as some distorted signal that average resides somewhere between the two-inch difference in Moss’s and Lara Stone’s hip measurements.

Mostly, though, it’s just proof that PR spin has either reached a new low, more proof that journalists can’t do PR, or both.