Last weekend, the New York Times published an essay by fashion critic Cathy Horyn titled "What's Wrong with Vogue?"  Horyn's short answer to her own rhetorical question was this: "Vogue has become stale and predictable, and it has happened in spite of some of the best editors, writers and photographers in the business." 

Horyn is right, but there is more to it than that.

What has really happened to Vogue -- and what will happen to other fashion magazines, I predict, in the next year -- is the recession.  It's hard to care about couture when you're wondering how to pay the bills, and even those who can afford high end shopping are cutting back, because conspicuous consumption is out.    Horyn sees this, too:

It’s embarrassing to see how Vogue deals with the recession. For the December issue, it sent a writer off to discover the “charms” of Wal-Mart and Target. A similar obtuseness permeates a fashion spread in the January issue, where a model and a child are portrayed on a weekend outing with a Superman figure. Is a ’50s suburban frock emblematic of the mortgage meltdown?

The answer, of course, is no. We are past the point where longing for a simpler time makes us feel better about today; we've reached the moment where we need to dig in and dig out, and it takes more than a pretty frock to do that.

Tiffany Neal at StyleList has another complaint about the magazine: 

It's no secret that we have a major crush on editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and her fashion bible known to all as American Vogue.
That said, we've been left scratching our head pretty much each and
every time we take home a issue of the magazine from the grocery store
each month. And the January '09 issue was no exception.

Each year, Vogue touts the people whom it felt were the most fashionable and stylish throughout the year by placing them in their coveted annual Best Dressed list. Sure, we get that one has to have pretty deep pockets in order to afford the fashion that would land one on the list, but who cares about socialites? Not us! And they make up seventy percent of the chosen few. Le sigh.

Neal gets at the heart of what is wrong with Vogue: while we know that fashion requires resources we don't have, we're not interested in the styles of women who DO have the money; we prefer the fantasy of celebrities, for whom fashion isn't about buying but about wearing.  

Vogue's emphasis on the fashion lives of socialites is particularly out of place in a recession, and particularly uninteresting to women who don't shop at WalMart because it is charming but because it is convenient and affordable.  We are willing to accept that celebrities -- Gwyneth Paltrow, for example -- do not live the lives of mere mortals; in fact, we look to them for fashion and beauty inspiration because that's their job.  But socialites (does such a category even really exist any more?) are just girls who don't have anything better to do, at least not in comparison to the busy life of the average American woman. 

But I don't mean to pick on Vogue; fashion magazines in general are struggling to find a neutral ground on which to pitch the value of couture.  The January issue of Harper's Bazaar has a piece on Shopping Your Closet; imagine my disappointment when the suggestions turned out to be things like "Pull out that vintage Channel bag!"  Clearly, this isn't my closet.

Not all fashion magazines are out of touch with recession shoppers, though.  Glamour recently ran a shop-your-closet feature that walked readers through 100 new looks using basics that many readers were entirely likely to actually have in the closet (skinny jeans, graphic tee, sheath dress).  The dilemma, of course, is that while articles about not buying are good for reader's financies, they are bad for the magazine's financial health.  Advertisers don't want to place products in the midst of a whole series of use-what-you-have pieces -- they want readers to be seduced by the need for new things and to run out and shop.

Essentially, I think there is nothing wrong with Vogue -- the photography is breathtaking and the writing is stellar.  Vogue's project is not to provide fashion advice for Everywoman; it is the classic fashion magazine.  Read it as such and you will be pleased; read it with an eye to spiffing up your own wardrobe and you may be disappointed.

Will the recession be the death of traditional fashion media?  I doubt it.  There will always be a place for publications like Vogue, just as there will always be a place for couture. After all, poking fun at Vogue's sensibilities is nothing new -- in August of 2007, Glossed Over liveblogged an attempt to read the 850 page September issue in one sitting.  Highlights: 

8:19 p.m.: So if Kate Moss looks like Grover from Sesame Street in that fluffy electric blue Versace coat, how will any mere mortals wear the thing?

8:46 p.m.: Okay, this Taryn Rose ad?  New heights of ridiculousness.  The model is wearing a short, low-cut dress with a fur stole and leopard-print heels.  Not so weird...except that she’s apparently standing outside a medieval cottage with a wooden door pruning her garden.  (No, that’s not a metaphor--she’s holding a pair of clippers in one pink rubber glove-clad hand and a long-stemmed bud in the other.)  Also?  Not a
single flower on any of the plants in the photo.  Ads that make no
sense make us wince.  We’re idealists.

8:50 p.m.: Guess what?  More ads for crap we can’t afford!

9:25 p.m.: Ad for Le Mystere No. 9, the bra for women with breast implants.  No, really.

10:12 p.m.:
According to their ad, Lord & Taylor sells the perfect clothes for
playing croquet on the lawn of your mansion with kids dressed in
breastplates and doublets.  Great!  We were looking for exactly the
right outfit for our next event!

11:49 p.m.:  So we skip the gratuitous society party story, and what do we get?  An endless ad for Juicy and the same ShopVogue.com ad we’ve already seen twice!  It’s like the magazine knew we were skipping something and decided to punish us for it!

12:34 a.m.:  You know how lingerie ads usually feature women lounging around their homes in a matching, ornate bra and panty?  Well, La Perla’s ad has a woman lounging around her DECREPIT WOODEN ROWBOAT in an intricate set.  At last, a realistic depiction of how we women wear our fancy lingerie!

2:04 a.m.:  Six hours in and hundreds of pages left to go, and we haven’t even read all the articles.  We can’t decide if we hate ourselves or Vogue more.

The moral, it seems, is not that Vogue has gotten sillier or more out of touch in the past year and a half, but that we are more acutely aware of the disparity between what Vogue is hawking and what we are buying.  Then again, as Glossed Over points out in a recent post about Glamour, fashion magazines as a genre may be hawking something essentially ridiculous ("Null: Likelihood I would ever publicly admit to being “inspired” by the direction Gwyneth Paltrow combs her hair").  

So what's wrong with Vogue?  Nothing, really, or at least nothing that can -- or needs -- to be cured.  In the end, ShinyStyle makes the most interesting point; they want to know if you still read Vogue (I do).  As their poll points out, the very fact that there is so much discussion about who reads Vogue seems to indicate that Vogue isn't going anywhere.

Susan Wagner writes about style at ParentDish and everything else at Friday Playdate.  She reads Vogue for the articles.  Of course.