Old magazines

Very funny - I was just reading through the Jezebel blog, about celebrity and fashion, and found a long, delicious post about In Fashion magazine, where I worked from 1991 to 1993 as the managing editor and, for about six months, as executive editor when I was in my early 20s.

The conceit of In Fashion was that it was "for men and women," and so there had to be a man and a woman on the cover. For the editors, this was a nightmare: we had to choose and book two B-list stars to be in NYC or LA at the same time and to get them to look hot and bothered together on a magazine cover.

For one cover, we booked Tia Carrere and Jon Bon Jovi, but the photos were a disaster. Tia Carrere was newly married and when she arrived at the studio in LA, conveyed that her husband was the jealous type. So she insisted on wearing a serious bra - eliminating many of the trashy, sexy clothes chosen for the cover shot - and she prominently displayed her wedding-ringed hand in every photo. We had to scrap that cover and shoot another at the last minute, but I did get to interview Bon Jovi and went to one of his concerts.

There are other funny stories from the pages in that Jezebel post, too. I worked on two issues they show: the one with John Corbett and MTV's Karen Duffy on the cover, and the one with rocker Nuno Bettencourt and Vanessa Paradis.

John Corbett was stale from Northern Exposure at that stage, and I think we booked him because the exec editor thought he was cute; I think Duff happened to be available.

I was the executive editor for the Nuno/Vanessa issue; I'd never heard of Nuno before but his band, Extreme, had a hit called "More Than Words."


When I interviewed him, I was particularly pleased that I'd asked him if he had a snake - which he did. Ah, the uselessness of celebrity journalism and wasted intuition.

In Fashion - good times!